Abstract
Recently, an increase in the urban population and the expansion of the urban area proceed rapidly in local cities in China which have achieved rapid economic development. As a result, the urban sprawl becomes a serious problem. It is important to grasp the future land cover change to create comfortable urban areas. In this paper, we investigated the prediction of future land cover based on the past satellite data by using the Markov chain analysis and the cellular automata analysis considering various socio-economic factors of the land cover change for the city planning area of LangFang City in HeBei Province. As a result, we found that the prediction method was useful. We estimated that the farmland especially in the urban fringes which was located near the built-up area will be changed to the built-up area in the future.
