Extracting an Urban Growth Model's Land Cover Layer from Spatio-Temporal Cadastral Database and Simulation Application

Land cover data, resolution, and time are among the important factors of SLUETH and similar urban growth simulation models (UGSM). Multitemporal satellite images are often used in many UGSM projects and settlement area, forest, agricultural area, highway, and temporal land cover classes can be extracted from satellite data using image processing techniques. However, land cover classes can also be economically obtained with higher resolutions from cadastral maps. Parcels and attributes in the geographical and temporal database may support a more realistic on-land cover change. The aim of our study is to determine the land cover change from 1961 to 2014 with temporal cadastral data and simulate urban expansion starting from 2030 to 2070 using SLUETH, a cellular automata (CA) based UGSM, for densely the populated Sancaktepe District in the metropolitan area of Istanbul. The population of Sancaktepe increased over 55% between 1961 and 2014, while approximately half of the forest and agriculture areas were transformed to a settlement area. According to the simulation results, if necessary precautions are not taken, almost all of the remaining forest and agricultural areas will be converted into residential areas by 2070.