A GIS Based Integrated Land Use/Cover Change Model to Study Agricultural and Urban Land Use Changes

Land use and land cover is an important component in understanding the interactions of the human activities with the environment and thus it is necessary to be able to simulate such changes. The authors have developed a national scale, integrated, dynamic time-series simulation model called the ‘Anthropogenically Engineered Transformations of Land Use and Land Cover’ (AGENT-LUC) Model, which simulates two major land uses that are influenced by humankind – agricultural and urban land uses. The land use transformations are a result of the interaction of the biophysical drivers and human drivers. It applies the concept of the presence of an “agent” as the decision-maker based on the information available to it at a particular point in time and space, in simulating the land use/cover changes. In the process of development of this model, a new spatial model for population growth and changes has also been developed, which has shown that the land use conditions is a major contributing factor in the migratory tendencies. Model outputs are the changes in the cropping pattern of the agricultural land area, the expansion of the agricultural lands, rural-urban migrations and the spread of the urban areas. The model was applied to the Royal Kingdom of Thailand, at a decadal time step and the spatial and temporal results will be presented in the paper. The changes are simulated annually and the entire process is carried out on a grid (1km square) basis.