Demeter - A Land Use and Land Cover Change Disaggregation Model

Land use and land cover change (LULCC) significantly influences the evolution of the Earth system. Projections of LULCC are often provided by economic models at regional scale. However, tools for downscaling and propagating LULCC 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 projections of future land use and land cover from regional models into high-resolution representations of time-evolving land cover suitable for input into complex Earth system and global hydrologic models in a variety of formats and resolutions.

In this presentation, we will review progress in Demeter development and applications including: (1) the recent release of Demeter as a tool to disaggregate projections of future land allocations generated by the Global Chang Assessment Model (GCAM), which accounts for a wide range of human-Earth system interactions; (2) the calibration and uncertainty quantification of six key Demeter parameters (e.g., intensification ratio and selection threshold) at the GCAM regional level using the European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative (ESA-CCI) land cover dataset (1992-2015) as the benchmark; (3) the comparison between Demeter and the Land Use Harmonization Version 2 dataset (LUH2) downscaling methodology and products to determine model efficacy in representing the GCAM projections for 2015 - 2100 used in the World Climate Research Program Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6); and (4) the planned release of GCAM official land use and land cover scenarios, based on the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs; Calvin et al., 2017), using Demeter development and parameterization.