LAUSR

Spatial simulation of land-use change scenarios in metropolitan areas is essential for analyzing both the causes and consequences of various future scenarios and is also valuable for land-use planning and management. However, current simulation models primarily focus on spatial and rarely on quantitative driving factors. This article aims to simulate future scenarios of land-use changes in the Tehran metropolitan region (TMR) by combining different models to fill this gap. Thus, in the first step, land-use changes were analyzed in the period 1985, 2000, and 2015. Then, by identifying the impact of driving factors and land-use transition potentials with Logistic regression (LR), land-use changes were allocated using the Cellular Automata (CA) method. Finally, with the validation of the model, four scenarios of the current trend(CT), socioeconomic growth(SEG), ecological-oriented(EO), and integrated development(ID) were suggested with the combination of the System Dynamic (SD) model. The results show that the trend of land-use changes in TMR has led to the destruction of grassland, agricultural, and uncultivated lands and the continuation of this trend will increase the damage of built-up areas on valuable natural and ecological resources. In this way, proximity to roads, distance from built-up areas, and natural factors had the greatest impact on changes. Based on future scenarios in 2030, the change in the SEG-scenario shows a rapid increase in built-up areas (2858km2) and encroachment on agricultural lands (2171km2). In the EO-scenario, destruction of grassland and agricultural lands and the growth of built-up areas will be limited, while CT-scenario leads to the high growth of built-up areas along with destructive impacts on natural and open spaces. In the ID-scenario, the built-up areas and grasslands will increase to 2808km2 and 7438km2, respectively. Accordingly, policy-makers can use simulation of different scenarios to mitigate probable consequences of land-use changes in the metropolitan regions.