This paper advances an empirical model assessing how, over both time and space, changes in land-use respond to changing economic and ecological conditions. Focusing on Central North Carolina, a region that has undergone extensive changes in forest cover and agricultural lands over the past two decades, landscape dynamics are modeled by exploiting a spatial database that links several satellite images spanning the years 1975-1999 to a suite of socioeconomic, institutional and GIS-created explanatory variables.