Urban land change modeling: Progress and future directions

Keywords: Urban growth; urban sustainability; land-use land cover change; LULC modeling
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

There is growing interest in understanding the land changes that occur at multiple scales due to urbanization and their implications. Urban land change models, besides exploring how urban land change may evolve into the future, also hold great potential to facilitate this understanding. Here, we review urban land change modeling studies and identify the knowledge gaps and opportunities for further advances. Through a systematic review of literature, we analyzed a total of 348 papers, 50 and nine of which were, respectively, large regional and global studies. The rest collectively had over 200 case-study locations from over 50 countries with the most case-study locations in China (32), Iran (10), and India (8). For two-thirds of the papers, the focus was solely on “land-cover change”. Kappa, despite its shortcomings, remains to be widely used as a validation method. Only about a third of the papers incorporated a scenario approach and only two studies generated probabilistic forecasts. Progress on the real-world relevance of urban land-change models will greatly advance their potential to inform policies in managing urbanization in line with sustainability goals.