Scenario Prediction of Urban Growth Based on the SLEUTH Model

To support urban planning for sustainable development, the SLEUTL model was selected to predict urban growth under different scenarios in this paper. Taken the Dongguan central city of the Pearl River Delta as an example, three scenarios for different planning goals were created, which were the Historical Trend (HT) scenario, the Forest Protection (FP) scenario and the Growth Restriction (GR) scenario. The results showed that the urban area would expand continuously from 2003 to 2030 under the HT scenario. More land resources would be saved in GR scenario than FP scenario. Furthermore, the urban growth under HT and FP scenarios would come to a steady state at 2020, while this deadline of the GR scenario would be postpone to 2025. The results of scenario prediction demonstrated that the GR scenario was more effective to meet the goal of land protection for the study area.