Measuring and Predicting Long-Term Land Cover Changes in the Functional Urban Area of Budapest

József Lennert,Dorián Baka,Zoltán Kovács,András Molnár,Jenő Zsolt Farkas,András Donát Kovács,Rita Módos

doi:10.3390/su12083331

Abstract

The loss of farmland to urban use in peri-urban areas is a global phenomenon. Urban sprawl generates a decline in the availability of productive agricultural land around cities, causing versatile conflicts between nature and society and threatening the sustainability of urban agglomerations. This study aimed to uncover the spatial pattern of long-term (80 years) land cover changes in the functional urban area of Budapest, with special attention to the conversion of agricultural land. The paper is based on a unique methodology utilizing various data sources such as military-surveyed topographic maps from the 1950s, the CLC 90 from 1990, and the Urban Atlas from 2012. In addition, the multilayer perceptron (MLP) method was used to model land cover changes through 2040. The research findings showed that land conversion and the shrinkage of productive agricultural land around Budapest significantly intensified after the collapse of communism. The conversion of arable land to artificial surfaces increased, and by now, the traditional metropolitan food supply area around Budapest has nearly disappeared. The extent of forests and grasslands increased in the postsocialist period due to national afforestation programs and the demand of new suburbanites for recreational space. Urban sprawl and the conversion of agricultural land should be an essential issue during the upcoming E.U. Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reforms.

Highlights

Urbanization plays a significant role in land use changes around the world
The results of our research can be summarized as three theorems: 1. Due to urban sprawl, the extent of artificial surfaces in the functional urban area (FUA) of Budapest will increase over time, irrespective of the economic and political system; 2
The most important lesson from our 80-year analysis is that the area of artificial surfaces and their proportion within the land use of Budapest’s FUA have been dynamically increasing since the late 1950s; the periods before and after the change in regime (1989-90) had distinct characteristics as far as the intensity and spatiality of land conversion is concerned

Summary

Introduction

The rapid expansion of artificial surfaces in metropolitan regions has caused versatile conflicts between nature and society and has created challenges for sustainability [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. Many authors have documented how the growth of built-up areas has led to a rapid decline in agricultural land and other green surfaces around cities, generating negative impacts on biocapacity and sustainability [21,22,23]. In the future, planning and managing urban expansion is “critical for ensuring agricultural growth and food security" around cities and for the sustainable development of city regions [24,25]

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion