Land-use and land-cover change (LUCC) projects have inspired researchers to examine complex land-use change systems and develop land-use change models. Various land-use change models have been utilized to simulate land-use change; however, no biophysical approach that can identify material and energy flows in a land-use change system exists. Although spatial system modeling, based on the systems approach, can simulate interactions between natural environments and socio-economic systems, and verify hypotheses and theories regarding land-use change and socio-economic metabolism; it has not received much attention due to its difficulties in dealing with spatial interactions and integrating different software programs. This study presents a procedure that uses Geographical Information System (GIS) in modeling a spatial system to overcome methodological disadvantages of spatial system modeling. To simulate land-use change, an example is utilized to demonstrate the capability of Model Builder in GIS software.

?More importantly, although a single urban region may not result in a large impact on global climate, the collective impact of all urban regions on the global climate system is as yet unknown and unstudied. Jin et al. (2005a) show that zonal mean UHI has 1?3 degree warming over the Northern Hemisphere latitudes, implying that the collective UHI may be a significant contributing factor in the overall global warming signal.? and ?The current urban scheme does not include potentially important urban land-atmosphere feedbacks, in particular, urban aerosols? impacts on surface insolation and aerosol-cloud rainfall interactions over urban regions. Therefore, the presented urban impacts are limited to those resulting from changes in the urban surface only. Future model development on coupled urban land-atmosphere interactions is essential for fully understanding the extent of urban impacts.? The role of urban areas within the climate system is yet another human climate effect whose role was minimized in the 2007 IPCC WG1 Report.