Simulation of land use changes in a coastal reclaimed area with dynamic shorelines

Abstract

Reclamation is capable of creating abundant land to alleviate the pressure from land shortages in China. Nevertheless, coastal reclamation can lead to severe environmental degradation and landscape fragmentation. It is quite important to monitor land use and cover change (LUCC) in coastal areas, assess coastal wetland change, and predict land use requirements. The siltation of tidal flats will result in the dynamic growth and continuous expansion of coastal areas. Therefore, the process of land change in coastal areas is different from that under the fixed terrestrial boundary condition. Cellular Automata and Multi-Agent System (CA-MAS) models are commonly used to simulate LUCC, and their advantages have been well proven under the fixed boundary condition. In this paper, we propose CA-MAS combined with a shoreline evolution forecast (CA-MAS-SEF) model to simulate the land change in coastal areas. Meanwhile, the newly increased area, because of the dynamic growth of tidal flats, is considered in the simulation process. The simulation results using the improved method are verified, and compared with observed patterns using spatial overlay. In comparison with simulation results that do not consider the expansion of tidal flats, the Kappa coefficient estimated while considering the dynamic growth of tidal flats is improved from 65.9% to 70.5%, which shows that the method presented here can be applied to simulate the LUCC in growing coastal areas.