Promoting urban land use efficiency by modeling gradual urban fraction change at the grid scale

Keywords: impervious surface area; temporal context; urban sprawl; neighborhood
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 64

Abstract

The cellular automata (CA) based models have been extensively used in urban sprawl modeling to support sustainable urban planning. However, in most existing urban CA models, only binary conversion was considered, and the difference of urbanization levels among different grids was ignored. Here, we proposed an impervious surface area (ISA) based urban CA model that can simulate the change of urban fraction within each grid, using annual urban extent time series data from satellite observations. We implemented the developed ISA-based urban CA model in Beijing (China) and evaluated its performance through model comparison and scenario analyses. We found the ISA-based urban CA model can well capture the dynamics of urban sprawl with significantly improved efficiency and performance compared to the binary urban CA model. The spatial pattern of modeled ISA is generally consistent with observed satellite data, with the root mean square error between the modeled and referred results of 0.14 across all changed pixels. Besides, the modeled result from our developed model agrees with that from the binary urban CA model with notably reduced overestimation errors. The change of urban fraction within each grid revealed in our model can provide more details than the traditional binary urban CA models, showing great potential in promoting the efficiency of urban lands. Furthermore, the developed ISA-based urban CA model can be used for regional, even global scale urban sprawl modeling with urban fraction information in each grid, to support decision-making on the sustainable management and conservation of natural land resources.