Calibration of the SLEUTH urban growth model for Lisbon and Porto, Portugal

The SLEUTH model (slope, landuse, exclusion, urban extent, transportation and hillshade), formerly called the Clarke Cellular Automaton Urban Growth Model, was developed for and tested on various cities in North America, including Washington, DC, and San Francisco. In contrast, this research calibrated the SLEUTH model for two European cities, the Portuguese metropolitan areas of Lisbon and Porto. The SLEUTH model is a cellular automaton model, developed with predefined growth rules applied spatially to gridded maps of the cities in a set of nested loops, and was designed to be both scaleable and universally applicable. Urban expansion is modeled in a modified two-dimensional regular grid. Maps of topographic slope, land use, exclusions, urban extents, road transportation, and a graphic hillshade layer form the model input. This paper examines differences in the model’s behavior when the obviously different environment of a European city is captured in the data and modeled. Calibration results are included and interpreted in the context of the two cities, and an evaluation of the model’s portability and universality of application is made. Questions such as scalability, sequential multistage optimization by automated exploration of model parameter space, the problem of equifinality, and parameter sensitivity to local conditions are explored. The metropolitan areas present very different spatial and developmental characteristics. The Lisbon Metropolitan Area (the capital of Portugal) has a mix of north Atlantic and south Mediterranean influences. Property is organized in large patches of extensive farmland comprised of olive and cork orchards. The urban pattern of Lisbon and its environs is characterized by rapid urban sprawl, focused in the urban centers of Lisbon, Oeiras, Cascais Setúbal, and Almada, and by intense urbanization along the main road and train lines Computers, Environment and Urban Systems