Suitability
Suitability (aka Transition Potential, Utility, or Land Use Value) is a combination of factors that express the added value of allocating a resource to a purpose.
In the context of Land Use Modelling:
- resources are usually land units, often organised as a grid of raster-cells.
- purposes are usually land use types
- the added value is expressed as:
- ratio (which relates to the use of the pseudonym Transition Potential)
- monetary unit of Yield per land unit or area per unit of duration, say:
$\frac{EUR}{m^2 \cdot year^{-1}}$ - the capitalized value thereof, say:
$\frac{EUR}{m^2}$ .
- suitability is operationalized as a set of value maps, one for each Land Use Type.
- physical factors, such as soil type, determine specific production plans' annual yield.
- locational factors (usually taken as positive, representing interaction value, although a more physical interpretation related to negative costs of transportation and travel would make sense, too).
- accessibility measures
- neighbourhood enrichment or neighbourhood potential (aka convolution).
- transition costs of destruction and reconstruction (usually represented as one-time costs, which forces a modeller to think on annualisation or capitalisation)
- location-specific subsidies and/or taxes
- spatial planning restrictions (sometimes taken separately in Allow maps).
- physical restrictions on transition (which are sometimes time-dependent).
