## 1 Introduction  
Human pressures on the environment have their most apparent manifestation in the visible transformation of the Earth's surface. Over the last 50 to 100 hundred years, the most important factor in the change in terrestrial ecosystems has been land cover conversion [1,2], and this trend is likely to continue in the future [3]. Land use/land cover (LULC) maps offer a way to document and quantify these changes [4]. Technological improvements over the last several decades have enhanced LULC maps' ability to observe the outcomes of social and ecological processes on the landscape [5]. Projecting LULC patterns into the future can be a useful exercise for evaluating how these processes change and identifying potential consequences. Creating a series of possibilities given the available information can provide insights for spatial planning. These possibilities or scenarios provide a useful way to sketch out the future with a level of plausibility \"_while explicitly incorporating relevant science, societal expectations, and internally consistent assumptions about major drivers, relationships, and constraints_\" [6]. LULC change scenarios are important, because these can be used to evaluate the potential environmental impacts of decisions or policy shifts [7,8].  
In many instances, scenario creation is expert- and/or model-driven, and researchers make the case for their utility to end users [9, 10, 11, 12]. This is problematic in a case with high stakes and high uncertainty, as with land use. Decision makers often prefer their own judgment to model results, highlighting the need for a model to be transparent and simple [13]. Using a participatory approach can partly relieve this issue. Stakeholder and public participation legitimizes the process and justifies the use of the outcomes for planning and decision-making [14]. A key issue in scenario-building methods is the integration of stakeholder-derived qualitative data (typically in the form of a storyline) into models that require quantitative data to produce the final output [15]. There are strategies proposed to formally bridge this divide, like fuzzy cognitive maps [16]. However, in some practical cases, where LULC change is a large component of the final scenarios, an intuitive conceptual approach is used to translate qualitative storylines to quantitative input [17, 18, 19]. Our study follows a similar approach to these.  
The research objective is to develop maps of future LULC scenarios for the study area involving stakeholders. For this research, we define stakeholders as members of organizations with interests in LULC change within the study area [20]. Other researchers created LULC maps in the region for a larger area using a participatory method [21]. This work required several years with numerous iterations that struck a balance in defining assumptions along a gradient of citizen engagement and expert opinion for mapping outcomes to reach satisfactory results. The trend in scenario-building studies is that they are typically a time-intensive process. In an attempt to produce an LULC map relatively quickly, while still retaining the benefits of a participatory approach, we used a simple framework that integrated input from stakeholders with local knowledge into a geographic information system (GIS) modeling process. We took information gathered from a single workshop, as well as a few additional one-on-one conversations and used these as guiding principles for future land cover change. In this respect, our study is more a consultation than an engagement process, but it is a useful method for addressing an important problem in our research program. Although we anticipate more development along the urban-rural fringe in our study area, it is currently unknown where and how much new development will be placed specifically.