Not developed yet? Alternative ways to include locations without changes in land use change models

Biogeographers have developed a new generation of statistical models called presence-only models, which require no data concerning the absence of a species and do not assume that the absence of a species indicates habitat unsuitability. Both characteristics are especially useful when modeling a species that is actively spreading across a landscape. Although urban expansion is sometimes equated to an invading species, the applicability of presence-only models has not yet been explored when modeling urban growth. This article compares predictions of urban growth using a presence-only model (ecological niche factor analysis) and a more traditional presence-absence model (logistic regression). An additional model used pseudo-absence sites, from the presence-only model output, as input into the presence-absence model. The models were applied to New Jersey's Barnegat Bay Watershed. Overall, the traditional presence-absence model performed the best, although the presence-only model was sufficiently similar to warrant further exploration of presence-only models when no reliable absence data (i.e., locations where no conversion occurred) exists. However, due to data-formatting requirements of the presence-only model, it is difficult to accommodate data pertaining to administrative boundaries, which are inherently Boolean. Finally, the output based on the pseudo-absence approach over-predicted urban conversion when compared to the other approaches.