rasul yazdani chaharborj

The rapid urban growth of recent decades in Iran has resulted in extensive changes in urban fringe land-use patterns.It has also had considerable environmental and socio-economic impacts on these areas.Assessing changes of the past land-use patterns and simulation of their future changes are of vital importance inpolicy making and planning processes. Combination of geographic information system (GIS) and remote sensing (RS) may producea suitable tool for gathering and analyzingdata regarding land use changes. This articleuses the CA-Markov model to assess and simulate changes in land use patterns in Miandoab city.In the first stage, by using the multi-temporal satellite imagery for the years 1984, 1997 and 2010, the urban and urban fringe cover/land-use maps was created and changes was evaluated. Results indicate thatin the period of 27 years, urban and urban fringe land area increased to 1013 hectares and farm land-use area decreased to 1114 hectares. Then, by using Markov model, matrix of transition area of land-uses for the period of 1984-2010was calculated. In the next stage, the suitability maps of land-uses by using of mulicriteria evaluation methods were created. Finally, for forecasting the future changes of land-uses until the 2025 year, we used the CA-Markov model. Simulation results, indicatethat thedecline trend in farm lands and the trend increase in urban lands will continue. Therefore, if the current trend of changes continues without a sustainable development policy, it will have to a serious downfall in environmental and socio– economic conditions.