381 Journal of Environmental Biology April 2012 Onl i ne Copy Simulating future urban growth in the city of Kahramanmaras, Turkey from 2009 to 2040 Author Details Hakan Oguz Department of Landscape Architecture, Faculty of Forestry, Kahramanmaras Sutcu Imam University- (Corresponding author) 46100, Kahramanmaras, Turkey e-mail: hakan@ksu.edu.tr © 2012 Triveni Enterprises Vikas Nagar, Lucknow, INDIA editor@jeb.co.in Full paper available on: www.jeb.co.in J. Environ. Biol. 33, 381-386 (2012) ISSN: 0254- 8704 CODEN: JEBIDP Abstract City of Kahramanmaras has witnessed a rapid growth in the last five decades due to its agricultural and industrial potential. Urbanization has brought great challenges to the sustainable development of cities, especially in developing countries. A modeling system that could provide regional assessments of future development and explore the potential impacts of different regional management scenarios would be useful for the future health of the cities. The main goal of this study was to create a modeling system capable of depicting, quantitatively and graphically, the growth impacts of two land use policies and trends in the city of Kahramanmaras. Given its success with regional scale simulation, its ability to incorporate different levels of land protection through an “excluded” layer, and the relative ease of implementation and computation, the model developed by Keith Clarke from University of California at Santa Barbara, known as SLEUTH, was adopted for this study. SLEUTH is a pixel-based cellular automaton (CA) model and has been applied to several cities worldwide successfully. The model was calibrated using historic time series of developed areas derived from Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) imagery between 1984 and 2009, and future growth was projected out to 2040. Two alternative growth scenarios were modeled: (1) current trends, and (2) managed growth: regions with high landscape potential were protected from urbanization. This application of the SLEUTH model demonstrates an ability to address a range of regional planning issues and provides useful information for the cities’ future planning and development. Key words SLEUTH, Future urban growth, Land use/land cover change, Remote sensing Publication Data Paper received: 16 November 2010 Revised received: 17 June 2011 Accepted: 30 July 2011 Introduction During the past decades, urban growth has been accelerated with the population migration from rural areas to cities. Urban population in the world is estimated as 3.4 billion in 2010 and predicted to reach 5.7 billion in 2040 (Fig. 1). World’s urban population is also expected to exceed the world’s rural population first time in the history (UN, 2007). According to Masser (2001) urban growth is inevitable for the next two decades and that most of this growth will occur in the developing countries. As a developing country, Turkey is experiencing extensive growth of its urban areas due to a number of factors, most notably population growth via rural-urban migration. In Turkey, the rural population has been declining steadily, while the urban population has been increasing rapidly (Fig. 2). Urban population in Turkey is estimated as 54.1 million in 2010 and predicted to reach 78.4 million in 2040 (UN, 2007). Unplanned urban expansion can pose many environmental problems on a regional scale, including habitat fragmentation, loss of agricultural land, formation of urban heat islands, reduction of biodiversity, and significant landscape changes, all these play an important role on global climate change (Han et al., 2008). Given the long research tradition in the fields of urban geography and urban modeling (Batty, 1989; Knox, 1994), new sources of spatial data and new techniques offer better analysis, understanding, representation, and modeling of urban dynamics. The innovative techniques and combination of new data are going to support more informed decision-making for resource managers. Dynamic spatial urban models provide an improved ability for the resource manager in order to forecast future growth and to develop and test planning scenarios. Yet, the performance of the model is still limited by the input data needed for their calibration and validation (Herold et al., 2003). Special Issue - Environment and Geography in the Mediterranean Guest Editors - Dr. Recep Efe, Dr. Munir Ozturk and Dr. Sumati Gaumat