PARENT SESSION
Poster Session #16: Landscape Ecology I.
Monday, August 5. Presentation from 5:00 PM to 6:30 PM. Exhibit Hall B & C, TCC

Drivers of rural residential development in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

Hernandez, Patricia^*,1, Hansen, Andrew¹, ¹ Landscape Biodiversity Laboratory, Bozeman, MT

ABSTRACT- Analyses of the factors contributing to land use change are valuable to planners and researchers interested in assessing regulatory implications, economic costs and ecological consequences of future development. We currently lack a thourough understanding of the processes of land use intensification. This knowledge is needed in order to improve our ability to predict changes in land use intensity. This study shows how the amount of variation in growth in home density in rural areas of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem corresponds to a suite of spatially explicit biophysical and socioeconomic explanatory variables. Mixed models were used to develop regression equations, and discriminant analyses were used to analyze the traits that best destinguish communities that fell within different growth categories. Our findings indicate that spatial patterns of rural development were most strongly correlated with measures of accessability to public services and environmental amenities. The implications suggest that enhancing environmental amenities through land use planning and regulation can stimulate growth while limiting the ecological impacts of development. Future research will focus on building the Rural Development Model to reflect those relationships quantified in this study, and to simulate realistic spatial patterns of future development in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

KEY WORDS: Land use change, Rural development, GIS, Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem