Modelling landscape ecological assessments of land use and cover change scenarios. Application to the Bojnourd Metropolitan Area (NE Iran)

New paper of LET published on Land Use Policy. Assessing the spatio-temporal dynamics of land use and land cover change (LUCC) and its socioecological consequences on the landscape is essential to understanding the relationships between social and natural phenomena, especially in metropolitan areas. Research on the effects of metropolitan dynamics on landscape ecology should include two basic parts: the LUCC simulation and the ecological landscape assessment (LEA). This paper proposes a new integrated LEA-LUCC model that includes Multi-Layer Perceptron Neural Network (MLPNN), Markov Chains (MC), and Ecological Connectivity Index (ECI), to address the complex, nonlinear nature of the metropolitan socioecological system. Based on images from the Landsat satellite (1988, 1998, 2008, 2018) of the Bojnourd metropolitan area (NE Iran) and using MLPNN and MC to simulate LUCC (2028, 2038), historical and future scenarios are compared. and its impact on ECI is assessed. The research shows the potential of the model to analyze LUCC in space and time, as well as the efficiency of remote sensing data in LUCC analysis, especially in regions with a deficit of ground cover databases. As the results reveal, LUCC in the metropolis of Bojnourd can cause a major depression in the ecological functioning of the landscape. The LEA-LUCC model is a valuable tool for improving landscape sustainability in dynamic metropolitan areas and for predicting the effects of spatial planning. The model allows policymakers and spatial planners to choose appropriate strategies to move toward a socioecological transition from complex metropolitan systems. Check the scientific paper.