3.2.2. Spatial land-use simulation
Land-use related decisions are based on opportunities and constraints affected by both
biophysical and socio-economic factors operating at different scales. Integration of multicriteria
decision making (MCDM) approaches with GIS has proved useful in various
studies related to land-use analysis and planning [6,9], as these are able to integrate
multiple, disparate, socio-economic and environmental factors that affect land-use
changes. However, they are still inadequate for use in land-use models as contemporary
GIS are inefficient in dealing with dynamic spatial models and the temporal dimensions of
environmental processes. Dynamic modeling approaches such as cellular automata (CA)
and Markov chains are efficient in representing spatial dynamics. The approach used here
integrates the functionality of MCDM and CA techniques in order to simulate the land-use
conversions.