The Actor, Policy and Land Use Simulator (APoLUS), is a free and open-source modelling tool designed to simulate future land use change in the R software environment. APoLUS links spatial cellular automata modelling techniques with actor interactions to produce spatially-explicit land use simulations based on calibrated settings for Neighbourhood (N), Suitability (S), Zoning (Z) and Actor Dynamics (D). It simulates competition between multiple land uses, e.g. agriculture, forestry, urban; and incorporates a stochastic component (v) to include realistic variation between simulation runs. It is currently in use in several research projects across the world. The present document updates the user documentation to the current APoLUS version (9.5.2) as of April 2020, and includes new documentation on simulating land change tendencies and updated descriptions of accessibility, suitability and zoning blocks. For more information, and regular updates, see: https://simlander.wordpress.com/apolus/

The APoLUS model was initially developed under the remit of the EU FP7 Project COMPLEX (308601). Since 2016, however, no funding has been explicitly provided by any institution. Recent developments (2019), including this user guide, have been carried out as part of project work funded by the the Rural Affairs and the Environment Strategic Research Program of the Scottish Government, UK.