Urban Growth Model FUTURES 2.0.0 Released

Developers at the Center for Geospatial Analytics announced today the release of FUTURES 2.0.0, the latest official version of the center’s signature open source software for modeling urban growth.

The new release features several improvements, including optimized code that enables running the model’s patch-growing algorithm faster and over larger regions. A new tutorial also allows new users to quickly try FUTURES online in Jupyter Notebook before installing. 

FUTURES stands for the FUTure Urban-Regional Environment Simulation and was designed specifically to predict the environmental impacts of urbanization at a regional scale; it is one of the few land change models developed to explicitly capture the spatial structure of development. 

FUTURES is powered by GRASS GIS and can be run on Linux, Windows and Mac OS. Installation instructions and further details about the software, including published examples of its uses, are available on the FUTURES webpage.