Land use change modeling and calibration through transformation potential analysis

Land use transformation potential analysis can be used to improve spatially related policy-making processes. This paper presents a constrained cellular automata modeling approach, which is based on land use transformation potential analysis, to simulate land use changes with a special focus on industrial land use. METRONAMICA is served as the platform for land use change modeling and detailed calibration procedures for this platform are presented. A set of tools are developed specially for accelerating the calibration processes and can be adjusted for and used in other cases. With the help of these tools, the calibration time is greatly reduced from weeks to mere days. North Brabant region in the Netherlands is used for the case study as an illustration. A comparison among several different calibration methods is presented in the discussion part