Landscape change analysis with MOLUSCE - methods and algorithms

General structure of the plugin

MOLUSCE consists of several parts:

• GUI modules (implement user interface)
• Utility modules
  • Data Provider (provides procedures of reading/writing raster/vector data and similar utility functions)
  • Cross Tabulation (provides functions for creating contingency tables)
• Algorithmic modules:
  • Area Analysis (provides procedures of change searching, making change maps)
  • Modeling (provides submodules for modeling relation between input-output data)
  • Simulation (provides procedure of land change simulation)
  • Validation (provides statistic functions and procedures for validation of simulation result)

The paper describes internal structure of most important utility and algorithmic modules. The description is valid for structure of plugin version <= 1.x.x

Utility modules

Data Provider

The module provides data structure for internal storing of raster data. It uses numpy masked arrays as data store. The most important methods are:

• create save
• geoDataMatch
• getBand getBandsCount
• getBandGradation
• getBandStat
• getGeodata
• normalize denormalize
• resetMask
• setBand
• setGeoData