The effects of changing the resolution of land-use modeling on simulations of land-use patterns and hydrology for a watershed land-use planning assessment in Wu-Tu, Taiwan

The objective of this study was to analyze the planning strategy and observe the scaling effects on both simulated land-use patterns and hydrological components for the study watershed. The land-use modeling results revealed that altering grain sizes would have various impacts on the composition variables in logistic regressions of the land-use model used to simulate different land-use types with spatial characteristics. The landscape metrics showed that the effects of changing grain sizes on simulated land-use composition were significant when the grain size was increased to 2.5 times that of the finest grain in the watershed. Simulated hydrological components also changed significantly when the grain size of land-use modeling increased to 2.5 times that of the finest grain in the watershed. Moreover, in sub-watershed areas, the gradients of the spatial correlations of land-use patterns and hydrological components were in the reverse direction when the grain size was increased to twice that of the finest grain in the simulated period. The relations between grain size and both simulated hydrological components and land-use patterns present similar scale-relation functions.