Investigation of the effect of urban growth on agricultural lands using cellular automata based sleuth model

The population, which is constantly increasing worldwide, is an important factor that leads to the unplanned growth of urban areas. As a result, natural habitats are destroyed and socio-economic problems arise in cities. In order to prevent these problems, first of all, urban growth analyzes were carried out in order to keep agricultural activities under control. Today, models such as Cellular Automata, Artificial Neural Networks, Markov Chains have been developed. Since the last quarter of the 20'th century, in the light of the developments in technology, urban growth models have started to be produced on a more solid basis. In this study, it is aimed to determine the urban growth in the Selçuklu district of Konya, which is the study area with the SLEUTH model based on cellular automata, which is widely used in the modeling of urban growth and land use, and to examine the effect of urbanization on agricultural areas in the near future. In addition to the simulations carried out for the years 2030 and 2050 starting from 2015, which was determined as the last control year in the model, the simulation results of the year 2022 were compared with the terrain classes obtained from the Google Earth Engine (GEE) controlled classification of the 2022 Landsat satellite image. As a result of the creation of simulation models for the years 2030 and 2050, it was concluded that 10428.75-23747.49 hectares of agricultural land will be destroyed, respectively. The SLEUTH model has modeled a total of 56468.26 hectares of agricultural land for 2022. This corresponds to 95% of the classification result for 2022, which is an important factor in examining the accuracy of the model. As a result of this study, which is aimed to guide decision makers and planners, it is seen that the use of SLEUTH model has strong effects for the planned examination of future land use.