Simulating the impact of forest management scenarios in an agricultural landscape of southern Quebec, Canada, using a geographic cellular automata

Forest remnants are vital for the overall heterogeneity and health of rural landscapes. However, deforestation is a significant process afflicting large numbers of agroforested regions of the world. The Maskoutains regional county municipality (RCM) in southern Quebec, Canada, experiences intense deforestation that has reached critical levels. The goal of this study is to develop a geographic cellular automata (GCA) to model land-use change in this region and test the influence of different management scenarios on the fate of the forested remnants. The GCA was built using a 100 m cell size, a Moore neighborhood configuration, a 3 years time step resolution and probabilistic transition rules derived from the comparison of two land-use maps for the years 1999 and 2002. Four groups of management scenarios were tested: (1) status quo (SQ), (2) reduced deforestation (RD), (3) promotion of ligniculture (L), and (4) protection of forest connectivity (CONN). Results indicate that none of the scenarios succeed in maintaining the actual levels of forest area. However, certain scenarios (amongst the RD and CONN), significantly alter the loss of forest areas in the short to mid-term and delay the fragmentation, reduction, and isolation of forest patches.