Land Unit
A land unit is an atomic geographic element used as the smallest geographic element in land-use modelling. Land units could be parcels, administrative regions or grid cells. In a model, it is assumed that land use characteristics can be related to land units and thus are relatively homogeneous.
- When land units are small, one could reasonably assume that their use is homogeneous or of one type (at one specific instant of time, think of crop rotation), and a discrete allocation model might be appropriate.
- When land units are larger, they are often heterogeneous (but less fluctuating in time) and a continuous allocation might be better.
When land units all have the same area (such as raster cells of an equal area projection of the Earth's surface), all land-use types are mutually exclusive. The intensity of land use can be assumed location invariant (and all land-use types have one claim without bandwidth for the whole study area), a discrete allocation problem reduces to a variant of lambda-assignment (aka Semi Assignment Problem).
