Application of Geomod in Modelling Vegetation and Land Use Changes

Land use change is an important global issue that affects nearly all aspects of the environment. Spatial modeling of land use change is a technique to understand the processes of land use change in quantity and location. Today, various approaches have been developed for modelling land use changes. Geomod is one of the land use change modelling approaches used in many studies. In the present study, application and implementation of this model has been presented. In Geomod only two categories of land use or land cover are used and only the transition from the first category to the second and vice versa is simulated. Multi-temporal land use maps are needed to run this model for which we used multi-temporal satellite imagery use to prepare land use maps. Then, a change detection process was implemented through post-classification comparison. The effective factors of land use change were generated as map layers and multi- collinearity was investigated among them to select the final variables. Model validation was conducted using the validate module in Idrisi software. The future condition of the area can be modelled using results of this application. In many studies of land use change modelling, decrease of forest and pasture area and increase of agricultural lands and urban areas have been reported. Therefore, management scenarios are necessary to preserve natural capital and manage urban development and agricultural lands. Geomod is found to be suitable for modelling land use change in many areas considering the available and required data and capable of offering management scenarios.