The propogation of the uncertainty of land use maps to modeled landscape dynamics

Land use maps are widely used in modeling land use change, urban sprawl, and other landscape related studies. Misclassification of land use maps is usually provided as a measure of their quality. However, this very important information is rarely considered in land use based studies, especially in modeling landscape dynamics. The ignorance of the uncertainty of land use maps may cause models to provide unreliable prediction. This study is an attempt to investigate the impact of the accuracy of land use maps to modeling urban sprawl. In this study, the regional confusion matrix has been localized using a topographical map. Based on the regional and local confusion matrices, several uncertainty levels have been adopted. The results showed that the localized confusion matrix has significant change in error rates to reflect the character of the study area. The predictions made at different uncertainty levels are quit different. The uncertainty sources are also analyzed in this study.