Spatially explicit simulation of deforestation using the Ising-like neutral model

Deforestation is a prominent example of anthropogenic land change. Here we investigate deforestation from a landscape ecology perspective by process-based modeling of a sequence of consecutive landscape patterns starting from a homogeneous forest and ending in homogeneous agricultural land. We propose an Ising-like neutral model to mimic the deforestation dynamics. Our goal is to demonstrate that such a simple conceptualization of the deforestation process is capable of simulating an evolutionary sequence of landscape patterns matching empirical data. The model has only two parameters, one representing an external pressure (for or against deforestation), and another representing a propensity of land for spatial autocorrelation. We perform a suite of simulations to link a process, as parameterized by the values of the two parameters, to the sequence of landscape patterns. We have found a narrow range of parameters for which the model quantitatively and visually matches empirical data. This indicates that the Ising-like neutral model captures the essential aspects of a deforestation process and that the temporal sequence of intermediate landscape patterns does not depend on the details of the process.