Applying SLEUTH for simulating urban expansion of Hangzhou

Urbanization is found to be closely associated with land use/land cover change which has an important influence in our environment and ecosystems, such as urban heat island effect, biodiversity loss, soil erosion, and pollutions. Studies on accurately simulating urban expansion have been inspired by increasing concerns of the sustainability of urban development. This paper reports our research aiming to simulate the expansion of Hangzhou city using SLEUTH (slope, landuse, exclusion, urban extent, transportation and hillshade) urban growth model. In this research, we investigates the urban spatial growth patterns based on Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM)/Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) images and creates four land cover change scenarios in 2020 with different socio-economic conditions. The results show that the SLEUTH model is less effective for depicting wave-like urban growth. From the four projected scenarios, urban area in this city will increase linearly and the shape of the city continues to be multi-nuclei in 2020. The hotspot area featured by intensive urban growth would, however, shift from urban center to sub-centers.