Journal of GeoSpace Science, 1(2) September 2016, Pages: 43-59 43 Monitoring and Predicting Landuse/Landcover Change Using an Integrated Markov Chain & Multilayer Perceptron Models: A Case Study of Sahiwal Tehsil Sharjee l Masud1, Zahir Ali 2 , Mateeul Haq 2 , Badar Munir Ghuri 1 1 Department of Remote Sensing & GISc, Institute of Space Technology, Karachi, Pakistan 2 Pakistan Space & Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO), Karachi, Pakistan Abstract Population growth, rapid developments and natural processes bring changes in landuse/landcover (LULC). The impact of these changes on natural resources and environment globally attract the researchers. The LULC changes has a great influence on agriculture, natural vegetation, and water resources. In this study, Remote Sensing (RS) and Geographical Information System (GIS) tools were employed instead of conventional methods. The target study area of Sahiwal tehsil comes under the jurisdiction of Sargodha district of Punjab province in Pakistan. A supervised classification (maximum likelihood) algorithm was applied on three Landsat TM images of 1999, 2009 and 2014. Five LULC classes including vegetation, built-up land, water, barren land and cultivated land were extracted. Furthermore, CA-MARKOV and MLP _MARKOV models were used for projecting LULC changes in the study area. The projected images of 2014 from both models were then compared with a base map of 2014 and MLP_MARKOV was selected for projecting 2019 LULC changes. The projected LULC classes for 2019 shows similar trends with an increasing trend in cultivated land. Keywords: Landuse/Landcover Change, Markov Chain, Cellular Automata 1. INTRODUCTION Land is a vital natural asset on which all measures for development are grounded. Landuse/landcover change is a significant factor for environmental and ecological change [1]. Local landuse/landcover changes in the consequences of environmental and ecological changes caused the recent global changes [2]. Landuse/landcover are two different terms. Landuse is an activity and development that people start on any type of landcover e.g. agriculture land, built up land. In contrast, landcover is a physical and organic cover of the land which includes water