Abstract
Rapid urban growth has historically led to changes in land use patterns and the degradation of natural resources and the urban environment. Uncontrolled growth of urban areas in the city of Quito has continued to the present day since 1960s, aggravated by illegal or irregular new settlements. The main objective of this paper is to generate spatial predictions of these types of urban settlements and land use changes in 2023, 2028 and 2038, applying the Dinamica EGO cellular automata and multivariable software. The study area was the Machachi Valley between the south of the city of Quito and the rural localities of Alóag and Machachi. The results demonstrate the accuracy of the model and its applicability, thanks to the use of 15 social, physical and climate predictors and the validation process. The analysis of the land use changes throughout the study area shows that urban land use will undergo the greatest net increase. Growth in the south of Quito is predicted to increase by as much as 35% between 2018 and 2038 where new highly vulnerable urban settlements can appear. Native forests in the Andes and forest plantations are expected to decline in the study area due to their substitution by shrub vegetation or agriculture and livestock land use. The implementation of policies to control the land market and protect natural areas could help to mitigate the continuous deterioration of urban and forest areas.
Highlights
Accepted: 18 August 2021Human activity has generated land use change for centuries, shaping the territory and exploiting natural resources [1]
The results show the ability of the cellular automata DinamicaEgo® software to produce accurate simulations using the available data; the simulated scenarios show the feasible evolution of land uses and the social and environmental challenges that could arise
For the allocation of land uses, the model was validated spatially with 72% similarity for a 7 × 7-pixel window [81,82] indicate that a similarity value higher than 50% between the compared maps is satisfactory for model validation
Summary
Human activity has generated land use change for centuries, shaping the territory and exploiting natural resources [1]. One of the uses with the highest impact on ecosystems is urban land use. The task of managing urban growth has increased in both scope and complexity, as today more than half the world’s population lives in cities. These cities are expected to absorb 72% of the future growth of the world’s population [2] by 2050 [3]. Urban cover is expanding at twice the rate of the global population growth due to rapid urbanization [4]. Urban land use increased from 0.6 million km in 2000 to
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