Land Change Modeling and Institutional Factors: Heterogeneous Rules of Territory Use in the Brazilian Amazonia.

Land changes are determined by a complex web of biophysical and socio-economic factors that interact in time and space, in different historical and geographical contexts, creating different trajectories of change. It is people’s response to economic opportunities mediated by institutional factors that drives changes. In this paper we discuss how to incorporate such institutional land tenure categories in land change models. Our hypothesis is that this is an essential step in the direction of constructing regional models to represent the heterogeneity of actors and processes. We implemented the conceptual proposal using the TerraME modeling Environment. Through a case study we analyze how the existence of different rules of territory use affects the landscape dynamics at the regional level.