ahmad pourahmad; roghaye heydari
Abstract
Continuous monitoring and forecasting of land use change in large cities is critical to both growth management and the sustainability of the urban ecosystem. The present study monitors land use and land cover changes in Rasht until 2019. It has also modeled and predicted changes until 2030. The applied ...
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Continuous monitoring and forecasting of land use change in large cities is critical to both growth management and the sustainability of the urban ecosystem. The present study monitors land use and land cover changes in Rasht until 2019. It has also modeled and predicted changes until 2030. The applied method of the article is descriptive-analytical, the data is time series of land use maps and the data processing method is the CA-Markov hybrid model. The validity of the model in the forecast has been confirmed with a kappa coefficient of 0.78 and an overall accuracy of 0.82. The results showed that the levels of urban land use class increased from 4915 hectares in 1993 to 9960 hectares in 2019 and the growth rate is predicted to reach 10555 hectares (114%) by 2030. In contrast, agricultural land cover will be reduced from 29,504 to 28,390 hectares by 2030. Overall, the declining rate in agricultural lands, paddy fields and forested areas shows that the increase in urban land use has occurred due to the encroachment of the city on land cover and the conversion of non-urban class inside and outside the city. The detrimental effects of land instability and resource instability are a major issue for the city and the current and future urban ecosystem. What is important for stabilizing the growth and gradual process to the metropolitan stage is that the management of the physical growth of the city should pay attention to both short-term and long-term periods. In the short term, it must control land cover change and transformation based on external growth control policies, and in the long term, it must focus on inward development policy strategies.