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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">EGUsphere</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>EGUsphere</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">EGUsphere</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">EGUsphere</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub"></issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/egusphere-2026-5027</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>Projecting global changes in land use and ecosystem services using SEALS (Spatial Economic Allocation Landscape Simulator) version 2.0</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Johnson</surname>
<given-names>Justin</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9903-1787</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Colesanti Senni</surname>
<given-names>Chiara</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Thakrar</surname>
<given-names>Sumil</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2205-3333</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff4">
<sup>4</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>von Jeetze</surname>
<given-names>Patrick</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff5">
<sup>5</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Department of Applied Economics, University of Minnesota; St. Paul, MN, USA</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>NatCap TEEMs, University of Minnesota; St. Paul, MN, USA</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff3">
<label>3</label>
<addr-line>Department of Finance, University of Zurich; Zurich, Switzerland</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff4">
<label>4</label>
<addr-line>School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh; Edinburgh, UK</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff5">
<label>5</label>
<addr-line>Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Potsdam, Germany</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>16</day>
<month>09</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>2026</volume>
<fpage>1</fpage>
<lpage>32</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Justin Johnson et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-5027/">This article is available from https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-5027/</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-5027/egusphere-2026-5027.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-5027/egusphere-2026-5027.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Land-use change alters ecosystems and the services they provide, but calculating these effects requires high-resolution land-use maps. Ecosystem service models rely on satellite-derived maps for present and historical conditions, using spatial resolutions of 10 to 300 meters. Scenarios of future land-use dynamics, however, are typically provided at resolutions of 0.25 arc-degrees (~30 km at the equator) or coarser, far too coarse for ecosystem-service models. Here, we describe and evaluate the Spatial Economic Allocation Landscape Simulator (SEALS) model, a global, computationally tractable model that downscales coarse land-use projections into high-resolution maps suitable for ecosystem service analysis. SEALS estimates 3.12 million parameters applied to spatial layers for land constraints, transition suitability and multi-scale adjacency convolutions, identified separately for each 1-degree tile globally. The parameters are trained on observed land-use change from 2000 to 2015 and validated on withheld data from 2020. SEALS can generate global 10 arc-second land-use maps in minutes on a standard laptop. We show that SEALS places change 1.9 times more accurately than a random allocation of the same change and that the advantage persists when near-misses are credited. Passing the downscaled maps to the InVEST habitat-quality model reproduces habitat quality calculated from observed land cover more closely than coarse accounting in nine of ten deforestation regions, showing that resolving where change falls improves a downstream ecosystem-service estimate. As a demonstration we downscale eight Shared Socioeconomic Pathway scenarios to 2100 and release the resulting global 10 arc-second land-use maps.</p>
</abstract>
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