The goal of this project was to create a spatially explicit 1km2 grid cell model for the Appalachian Landscape Conservation Cooperative (Figure 1) predicting where surface coal mining is likely to occur in in a projected future time period, under two different scenarios. To accomplish this goal we combined GIS spatial analysis, a Random Forests predictive model, and future mining buildout scenarios. This report provides a detailed methodology of our approach and discussion of our results.
