MAS / LUCC model simulate Land Use change in Erhai Lake Basin based on ant colony algorithm

Land Use and Land Cover Change (LUCC) is the essential content of the study of the current global environmental change and sustainable development, and has a profound influence on regional water cycle, atmospheric circulation, environmental quality, climate change, and terrestrial ecosystem productivity. It is also the most important reason causing biodiversity attenuation. The MAS/LUCC model of this paper is designed to explore the mechanism of the spatial and temporal evolution of the land use change, which results from the interaction among government, residents, farmers, and other agents, the interaction between multi-agent and the environment where the agents live. The model also introduces the ant colony optimization to improve the simulation accuracy. Taking Erhai Lake Basin as a case, MAS/LUCC used the watershed land use classification map in 2000 as the initial data, predicted and simulated the land use types and structure of the watershed in 2010, using the land use classification map of 2010 as validation data. The accuracy of the model is 79.71% or so by the point-to-point verification method, and the ant colony optimization improves the precision of 8.94% compared with the model without it. Thus, it can be able to provide auxiliary decision support for the government and land-use planners to develop a land policy.