City versus wetland: Predicting urban growth in the Vecht area with a cellular automaton model

TL;DR

This study uses a cellular automaton model to predict urban growth in the Vecht area, highlighting how different wetland protection policies can influence landscape outcomes before 2035.

Contribution

It introduces a stochastic cellular automaton model to assess the impact of wetland protection policies on urban growth patterns.

Findings

Urban growth is projected to threaten wetlands before 2035 under full protection.

Milder protection policies can help preserve valuable landscapes.

Landscape priorities significantly influence future urban and natural area distributions.

Abstract

There are many studies dealing with the protection or restoration of wetlands and the sustainable economic growth of cities as separate subjects. This study investigates the conflict between the two in an area where city growth is threatening a protected wetland area. We develop a stochastic cellular automaton model for urban growth and apply it to the Vecht area surrounding the city of Hilversum in the Netherlands, using topographic maps covering the past 150 years. We investigate the dependence of the urban growth pattern on the values associated with the protected wetland and other types of landscape surrounding the city. The conflict between city growth and wetland protection is projected to occur before 2035, assuming full protection of the wetland. Our results also show that a milder protection policy, allowing some of the wetland to be sacrificed, could be beneficial for maintaining other valuable landscapes. This insight would be difficult to achieve by other analytical means. We conclude that even slight changes in usage priorities of landscapes can significantly affect the landscape distribution in near future. Our results also point to the importance of a protection policy to take the value of surrounding landscapes and the dynamic nature of urban areas into account.