Land-use change around protected areas can reduce their effective size and limit their ability to conserve biodiversity because land-use change alters ecological processes and the ability of organisms to move freely among protected areas. The goal of our analysis was to inform conservation planning efforts for a nationwide network of protected lands by predicting future land use change. We eval...

During the past four decades the city of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, has witnessed a remarkable rapid urban growth. This has coincided with lack of a planning framework, weak institutional and poor policies, which have caused haphazard and interrelated land use and transportation issues. Current land use and transport planning policies and practice in Jeddah seem to focus on different visions, caus...

Mobility, transport and land use patterns in urban areas are closely bound up with each other [1]. Urban form plays an important role when households and businesses make mobility decisions, and to a considerable degree dictates transport mode choice. Compact city form with high density and mixed use provide good preconditions for short trips and efficient public transportation, promote walking ...

Urban planning experts often use computer models to help evaluate alternative land use policies, particularly as they interact with transportation and environmental decisions. The greatly increased data volume provided by new land use models makes their effective use difficult without suitable visualization tools. We present UrbanView, a visualization system for urban modeling, and describe a u...

Land use/cover change is a major global environmental change issue and projecting these changes is essential for the assessment of environmental impacts. In this study, a combined use of satellite remote sensing, geographic information systems (GIS), and markov chains stochastic modelling techniques were employed in analysing and projecting land use/cover changes. The results indicate that ther...

Urban cellular automata (CA) models are broadly used in quantitative analyses and predictions of urban land-use dynamics. However, most urban CA developed with neighborhood rules consider only a small neighborhood scope under a specific spatial resolution. Here, we quantify neighborhood effects in a relatively large cellular space and analyze their role in the performance of an urban land use m...

Remotely sensed multi-spectral and -spatial data facilitates the study of mosquito-borne disease vectors and their response to land use and cover composition in the urban environment. In this study we assess the feasibility of integrating remotely sensed multispectral reflectance data and LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging)-derived height information to improve land use and land cover classific...

There has been worldwide concern for sustainable development especially after the 1992’s Rio’s UN Conference on Environment and Development. Rapid encroachment of urban development on valuable agricultural land will have great in ̄ uence on whether sustainable development can be achieved. A sustainable land development model is developed using GIS in an attempt to control urban sprawl under rapi...