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The landscape patterns are the results of the human activity that adapts the land cover and its use (LUC) to economic and social constraints/opportunities encountered by various actors. The temporal and spatial arrangement of LUC has a strong influence on environmental risks. This paper presents a methodology based on stochastic models to identify, locate and simulate the temporal LUCC of regions differentiated by their successions by means of "neutral" models. The differences between simulated and observed data make it possible to detect breaks in land-use development and planning. We assess our method on data that come from surveys in the Vittel-Contrexéville watershed (East of France) which is subject to water quality issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]