Assessment of Land Use Land Cover Changes and Future Predictions Using CA-ANN Simulation for Gazipur City Corporation, Bangladesh

Abstract

Anthropogenic activities have a significant influence on land use and land cover (LULC) changes, especially in rapidly growing areas. Among several models, the combination of a cellular automata–artificial neural network (CA-ANN) model is being widely used for assessing future LULC changes using satellite images. This study aimed to investigate LULC changes in Gazipur City Corporation (GCC), Bangladesh, and the changes in LULC patterns over the last two decades (2002 to 2022). In this study, the maximum likelihood supervised classification technique was used for processing the available satellite images. The results show that the urban area and vegetation coverage increased by 150% and 22.78%, whereas the bare land and waterbody decreased by 7.02% and 78.9%, respectively, from 2002 to 2022 inside the GCC area. For future LULC predictions, the CA-ANN model was developed, the accuracy percentage of which was 86.49%, and the kappa value was 0.83. The future LULC prediction model results show that the urban area will increase by 47.61%, whereas the bare land and waterbody are supposed to decrease by 24.17% and 67.23%, respectively, by 2042. The findings of this study could be useful for future sustainable urban planning and management, as well as enabling decision making by authorities for improvements in environmental and ecological conditions in the study area.