Purchasing land for open space use is crucial for municipalities that are concerned with conserving land and mitigating urban sprawl. Land-use modeling measures the ecological vs. economic trade-off. This book develops a land-use modeling system termed Modeling Open Space Acquisition (MOSA) that quantifies the ecological value of land targeted for open space acquisition. MOSA is designed as a decision support tool for local policymakers to identify ecologically rich parcels that can be targeted by using a multi-criteria model. Each parcel in the study area (Boulder, Colorado) is ranked by...