The integration of land change modeling framework FUTURES into GRASS GIS 7

Many valuable models and tools developed by scientists are often inaccessible to their potential users because of non-existent sharing infrastructure or lack of documentation. Case in point is the FUTure Urban-Regional Environment Simulation (FUTURES), a patch-based land change model for generating scenario-based regional forecasts of urban growth pattern. Despite a highimpact publication, few scientists, planners, or policy makers have adopted FUTURES due to complexity in use and lack of direct access. We seek to address these issues by integrating FUTURES into GRASS GIS, a free and open source GIS and research platform for geospatial domain. This integration will enable us to take advantage of GRASS GIS tools for landscape structure analysis, and thus eliminate the need to use proprietary software for data preprocessing. Moreover, integration into GRASS GIS simplifies the distribution of FUTURES across all main operating systems and ensures maintainability of our project in the future. We will present our use case of integrating this advanced land change model into GRASS GIS platform and discuss the current state of the integration as well as the planned steps to achieve our vision of simple-to-use and fully free and open source FUTURES.