Calibration of Land Use Change Drivers in Support of Dynamic Urban Growth Modeling

The Land use Evolution and impact Assessment Model (LEAM) is a cellular urban dynamics model designed to simulate changing landscapes over space and time. One of the challenging problems in the LEAM model is calibrating the model results, and this study presents a step to calibration. The probability of land use change in each cell is determined by various factors including a cell’s proximity to development attractors, which are physical features that promote residential and commercial developments. This study presents a way to calculate a cell’s proximity to development attractors and converting the proximity to relative probability to help with LEAM calibration. The ten-county area in Illinois and Missouri, USA, around the City of St. Louis, was chosen as a study area. The results show general patterns of distributions of existing urban cells in terms of travel time to attractors. Furthermore, existing residential and commercial land uses show distinct spatial patterns for development. The adoption of this method has contributed to more realistic simulation of new developments in the study area