Integration of land use and land cover models: Coupling two existing models to improve the simulation of location choice

Single models do not usually provide all answers required for complex policy decisions, so an integrated modelling is often applied to inform policy makers and urban planners. Developing a fully integrated model is an expensive and time consuming task, thus, coupling existing models is often used for model integration. The paper provides an overview of potential model integration approaches, briefly describes the Simple Integrated Land Use Orchestrator (SILO) model and the Chesapeake Bay Land Change Model (CBLCM), and focuses on the integration method applied to link those models. Particularly, Python wrappers were developed to loosely couple SILO and CBLCM; while ArcGIS Model Builder was used to provide a graphical user interface. The suggested approach is especially efficient when the models are developed in different programming languages, their source code is not available or the licensing restrictions make other coupling approaches infeasible.