Use of Landscape Metrics in Land Use Allocation

Creating and preserving large patches in land use configuration and satisfying compactness and contiguity in land use configuration are nature-prescribed and nature-inspired criteria that can be used in land use planning better that before. Accompanying compactness and contiguity as the important landscape metrics in land use planning and land use configuration is close to applying proactive approaches rather than assessing the intense of Human activitie's impacts on environment after its altering. To explain how to introduce compactness and contiguity to a land use configuration study, we assume the study area as a matrix that every cell or pixel of the matrix has the color or value that shows the type of land use. In this situation, the compact configuration will be made if the same color or value pixels are located adjacent to each other. With respect to this premise we defined some equations to achieve compactness and contiguity in land use configuration. Finally, we tested the equations in applied case of land use planning in a part of Gorgan Township. We applied hybrid of linear programming and ant colony algorithms for testing suggested method. The results show that the method can be succeeded in achieving these criteria.