Modeling urban growth using logistic regression based on GIS: A case study of Jiayu county, Hubei province, China

The role of land use/land cover change as a significant component of global change has become increasingly recognized in the recent decades. Urban growth modeling has attracted substantial attention because it helps to comprehend the mechanisms of land use change thus helps relevant policies made. Urbanization is a profound transformation of the Earth's environment, which leads to necessity of urban growth study. This study tends to apply logistic regression to model urban growth in the Jiayu county of Hubei province, China, in a GIS environment and to discover the relationship between urban growth and the driving forces of which biophysical and social-economic factors are selected as independent variables. A probability map is generated from the model to predict where urban growth will occur as a result of the computation.