Citation: Mahmoudzadeh, H.; Abedini, A.; Aram, F. Urban Growth Modeling and Land-Use/Land-Cover Change Analysis in a Metropolitan Area (Case Study: Tabriz). Land 2022, 11, 2162. https://doi.org/10.3390/ land11122162 Academic Editors: David Pastor-Escuredo, Alfredo J. Morales and Yolanda Torres Received: 16 October 2022 Accepted: 25 November 2022 Published: 30 November 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). land Article Urban Growth Modeling and Land-Use/Land-Cover Change Analysis in a Metropolitan Area (Case Study: Tabriz) Hassan Mahmoudzadeh 1, * , Asghar Abedini 2 and Farshid Aram 2, * 1 Department of Geography and Urban Planning, University of Tabriz, Tabriz 5166616471, Iran 2 Urban Planning Department, Urmia University, Urmia 5756151818, Iran * Correspondence: mahmoudzadeh@tabrizu.ac.ir (H.M.); farshid.aram@alumnos.upm.es (F.A.) Abstract: During the last three decades, the expansion of the Tabriz Metropolitan Area (TMA) to the surrounding areas has caused the destruction of environmental resources and problems such as disturbing ecological balance, increasing service costs, construction over unsuitable lands, exacerbation of air pollution, and lack of consideration of existing deteriorated textures and previous ongoing trends, reducing the environmental quality of the TMA. The goal of this study was to perform ecological modeling of urban development in the TMA with respect to the preservation of environmental resources, prevention of urban sprawl, and the management of the physical expansion of the TMA in an eco-friendly manner. In this research, to investigate the previous pattern of growth of the TMA, Landsat satellite imagers from 1984 to 2018 were used to discover the non-ecological and sprawl development of the TMA, and artificial neural networks and logistic regression techniques were applied to simulate future development up to 2038. According to information from the Iranian Statistical Center and 34 year of satellite imagery analysis, the population of the TMA increased from 1,007,992 to 1,961,560 during this period. Additionally, urban and rural land area increased from 7220.34 hectares to 27,640.57 hectares. A lack of coordination between population and urban expansion, as well as a decrease of 8513.61 hectares of agricultural and garden lands was inferred from the Holdern model. Detailed Calculations of the Holdern index (sprawl tendency) showed a lack of consideration of urban development capacity with population growth rate, and the Holdern index is equal to 0.6 in Tabriz. For future ecologic development of the TMA, hexagonal blocking of the urbanization probability map was used alongside environmental development policies in the form of using 30 percent of infill development capacities of inefficient land uses to prevent sprawl growth in Tabriz. Additionally, to preserve ecological landscapes, ecological networks in the form of green belts and bows with a length of 91 km were designed that may be effective in preventing the merging of small cities and nearby villages in the Tabriz metropolis. Keywords: land use changes; ecologic development; Tabriz Metropolitan Area (TMA); artificial neural networks; logistic regression; urban planning 1. Introduction Changes in land use and land cover are regarded as humanity’s most noticeable impact on the environment [1]. Supplying the requirements of an increasing population has led to significant changes to the surface of the Earth, with undesirable effects from local to global scales [2]. Decision makers and urban planners need accurate and comprehensive data on prospective urban growth to evaluate new development requirements, their location and features, and the effects of urban development before and after project implementation [3]. Modeling spatial land-use transition can lead to improved knowledge of the environmen- tal and Socio-economic variables relevant in promoting urbanization trends [4]. Many researchers have investigated the adverse effects of urban expansion, such as reducing natural areas and habitat fragmentation [5–8]; impacts on biodiversity [9,10]; deforesta- tion [11–13]; increasing air, water, and soil pollution [14–16]; exacerbating hydrological Land 2022, 11, 2162. https://doi.org/10.3390/land11122162 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/land