The kinetic Ising model encapsulates essential dynamics of land pattern change

A land pattern change represents a globally significant trend with implications for the environment, climate and societal well-being. While various methods have been developed to predict land change, our understanding of the underlying change processes remains inadequate. To address this issue, we investigate the suitability of the two-dimensional kinetic Ising model (IM), an idealized model from statistical mechanics, for simulating land change dynamics. We test the IM on a variety of patterns, each with different focus land type. Specifically, we investigate four sites characterized by distinct patterns, presumably driven by different physical processes. Each site is observed on eight occasions between 2001 and 2019. Given the observed pattern at the time t we find two parameters of the IM such that the model-evolved land pattern at t resembles the observed land pattern at that time. The data support simulating seven such transitions per site. Our findings indicate that the IM produces approximate matches to the observed patterns in terms of layout, composition, texture and patch size distributions. Notably, the IM simulations even achieve a high degree of cell-scale pattern accuracy in two of the sites. Nevertheless, the IM has certain limitations, including its inability to model linear features, account for the formation of new large patches and handle pattern shifts.