Simulation of land use / cover change in Shanghai based on SLEUTH model

With the rapid development of urbanization, the dynamic evolution of urban expansion has become one of the hot topics throughout the world. Thus, modeling and predicting the urban expansion in the future is one of the effective methods for the study of urban growth. Based on the rapid urbanization in Shanghai, our study uses four years of land use data (1995, 2000, 2005 and 2010), DEM and two years of traffic roads data (2005 and 2010) to obtain the optimal parameters of urban growth through model calibration. And the results of calibration were used to simulate and predict the land use change in 2040 under different scenarios of excluded layers. The results show that the urban growth in Shanghai is more often grow along the edge of existing urban centers and the transportation network with the relatively high spread coefficient (43) and road coefficient (66), while the dispersion, breed and slope coefficient are relatively low. The SLEUTH simulation with these five parameters possessed satisfactory capability of predicting land use changes with the kappa coefficient of 0.8628 and an appropriate Lee-Sallee index of 0.8139. The result shows that the urban areas in Shanghai increase significantly in 2040, while the rural area, grass and other construction area are decreased. Therefore, SLEUTH can better predict the spatial changes of land use and provide some theoretical support and decision-making basis for the urban-rural planning in Shanghai.