PNNL

The Science

Land use and land cover have a strong influence on the evolution of the Earth system, but tools for downscaling and propagating these changes across different modeling platforms are limited.

Demeter, an open-source model developed by the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, is designed to translate regional projections of future land use from integrated human-Earth system models into high-resolution representations of time-evolving land cover suitable for input into complex Earth system and global hydrologic models.

The Impact

Demeter provides a flexible and repeatable methodology to connect models that produce or require land use and land cover data at varying scales. Demeter is a well-documented, open-source community model that uses a common scale-independent methodology to advance the science of multi-sector, multi-scale dynamics research.

Reference: C.R. Vernon, Y. Le Page, M. Chen, M. Huang, K.V. Calvin, I.P. Kraucunas, C.J. Braun, "Demeter - A Land Use and Land Cover Change Disaggregation Model." Journal of Open Research Software 6(1), 15 (2018). [http://doi.org/10.5334/jors.208]