These
applications referred to urban expansion, cropland loss, water quality change, soil degradation, and so
on. At the same time, in the past decade, a major international initiative to study land use change, the
land use and LUCC (land use and land cover change) project, had gained great momentum in its efforts
to understand driving forces of land use change (mainly through comparative case studies), developed
diagnostic models of land use change, and produce regionally and globally integrated models [23, 28].