Land suitability and urban growth modeling: Development of SLEUTH-Suitability

Land suitability is one of the important variables influencing urbanization and needs to be considered in urban growth simulation and modeling. The present study is aimed to introduce land suitability which is a function of a few important urbanization explanatory drivers into an urban growth model for realistic urban growth simulation. Development of SLEUTH-Suitability, an improved version of the SLEUTH urban growth model has been presented in which land suitability has been integrated as an additional urban growth decision variable. The model development includes land suitability assessment, Multi-Criteria Evaluation (MCE) based Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) framework and its integration in the urban growth simulation process of the existing SLEUTH model, writing programming code, and verification of SLEUTH-Suitability version. The performance of the SLEUTH-Suitability version has been quantified in terms of relative improvement in the best fit value of the Optimal SLEUTH Metric (OSM), spatial and statistical measures while simulating urban growth of Ajmer City in the Rajasthan state of India as compared to existing SLEUTH version. Both versions i.e., SLEUTH and SLEUTH-Suitability models were parameterized and calibrated using a required dataset of 05 years over a period of 18 years i.e., 1997, 2000, 2008, 2013, and 2015. Performance of the SLEUTH-Suitability has been found to be better in terms of improved calibration as indicated by better OSM values and improved capturing of different urban growth forms like fragmented and scattered growth. Furthermore, using the SLEUTH-Suitability, urban growth is forecasted up to the year 2040 in Ajmer city to understand the growth pattern.