Remote Sensing, Gis and Cellular Automata for Urban Growth Simulation

Cities are complex spatial systems and modeling their dynamics of growth using traditional modeling techniques is a challenging task. Cellular automata (CA) have been widely used for modeling urban growth because of their computational simplicity, their explicit representation of time and space and their ability to generate complex patterns from the interaction of simple components of the system using simple rules. Integrating GIS tools and remote sensing data with CA has the potential to provide realistic simulation of the future urban growth of cities. The proposed approach is applied to model the growth of the City of Montreal. Land use/land cover maps derived from Landsat data acquired in 1975 and 1990 were used to train a CA model which was then used to project the land use in 2005.  A comparison of the projected and actual land uses for 2005 is presented and discussed.