ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book investigates the effects of dynamic feedback between land-use and hydrology on trade-off and synergy between multiple catchment ecosystem services, such as tradeoffs between grassland ecosystem services for livestock grazing and for water regulation. Land-use change modelling involves complex layers of socio-economic and biophysical factors. The book analyzes socioeconomic and biophysical land-use drivers with the objective of developing a predictive land-use model. Land-use change models commonly use, among other things, proximity factors such as distances from various resources and infrastructures such as roads, water bodies and markets to determine land-use suitability. With a web-based and automated implementation of dynamic land-use suitability analysis on the Abbay basin, it is shown computational power that are made available through platforms such as Google Earth Engine is used to resolve 'Big Data' bottlenecks in environmental assessment.
