Abstract
The city of Calgary in southern Alberta, Canada has a current population of 1,120,000 inhabitants; it has experienced steady population and unprecedented land-cover growth over the past six decades due to the strong Alberta economy centered on petroleum industry, tourism, and agriculture. The residential land developments currently expanding at the periphery add up to a sprawling city that is expected to reach 1.5 million inhabitants in 2020 and 2.3 million over the next 50–70 years. Such a rapid growth imposes dramatic land-use changes within and around the city that affect the adjacent environmentally sensitive areas, particularly in the western fringe of Calgary, located in the Elbow River watershed. This paper describes the application of two cellular automata (CA) designed at two spatial scales to investigate the land-use dynamics occurring respectively in the whole watershed and in the eastern portion of the watershed, immediately adjacent to the City of Calgary. The first CA is a cell-based model applied at a spatial resolution of 60 m while the second one is a patch-based model specifically designed to account for the greater level of details that can be observed at the resolution of 5 m. These two models were used to simulate different land development scenarios over a period of 20–30 years. The CA model implemented at the scale of the watershed provides useful information about alternative spatial distributions of urban areas that can occur according to spatial constraints imposed on land development, which can help decision makers find the most adequate distribution of population in regards to the resources that are available to sustain that population in the watershed. The CA model designed at fine spatial resolution allows the identification of detailed land-use classes and changes in their internal structure. It reveals how land consumption can be considerably diminished by encouraging the protection of sensitive areas and increasing the density of existing and new urban residential areas.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Agterberg, F. P., & Bonharn-Carter, G. F. (1990). Deriving weights of evidence from geoscience contour maps for the prediction of discrete events, in Proceedings of the 22nd APCOM Symposium (Vol. 2, pp. 381–396), Berlin, September 1990: Technical University of Berlin.
Almedia, C. M., Batty, M., Monteiro, A. M. V., Camara, G., Soares-Filho, B. S., Cerqueira, G. C., & Pennachin, C. L. (2003). Stochastic cellular automata modeling of urban land use dynamics: Empirical development and estimation. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 27, 481–509.
Bonham-Carter, G. F., Agterberg, F. P., & Wright, D. F. (1989). Weights of evidence modelling: A new approach to mapping mineral potential. In F. P. Agterberg, G. F. Bonham-Carter (Eds.), Statistical Applications in the Earth Sciences (pp. 171–183). Geological Survey of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario.
BRBC (Bow River Basin Council). (2010). Bow river basin: State of the watershed summary, Calgary, Alberta, Bow River Basin Council. http://wsow.brbc.ab.ca/reports/BRBCWSOWBookletV2-Dec28.pdf, p. 23.
Calgary Economic Development, Demographics. (2010). http://www.calgaryeconomicdevelopment.com/liveWorkPlay/Live/demographics.cfm.
Canada Land Inventory. (2008). http://geogratis.cgdi.gc.ca/geogratis/en/option/select.do?id=CB6E057B-0D85-9B22-29DE-6351369A8B02
Central Springbank Area Structure Plan. (2001). Department of Planning and Development, Municipal District of Rocky View No. 44. http://www.rockyview.ca/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=RKoWI2qipOo%3D&tabid=446&mid=858.
Chen, Z., Grasby, S. E., Osadetz, K. G., & Fesko, P. (2006). Historical climate and stream flow trends and future water demand analysis in the Calgary region, Canada. Water Science & Technology, 53(10), 1–11.
City of Calgary. (2009). Population Picture. Calgary: City of Calgary.
Civic Census Results City of Calgary. (2012). http://www.calgary.ca/CA/city-clerks/Documents/Election-and-information-services/Census2012/Final%202012%20Census%20Results%20book.pdf
Dickson, B. G., Prather, J. W., Xu, Y., Hampton, H. M., Aumack, E. N., & Sisk, T. D. (2006). Mapping the probability of large fire occurrence in northern Arizona, USA. Landscape Ecology, 21, 747–761.
Dietzel, C., & Clarke, K. C. (2007). Toward optimal calibration of the SLEUTH land use change model. Transactions in GIS, 11(1), 29–45.
ERWP. (2012). Elbow River Watershed Partnership. http://www.erwp.org/
Exelis Visual Information Solutions. (2012). http://www.exelisvis.com
Foley, J., DeFries, R., et al. (2005). Global consequences of land use. Science, 309, 570–574.
Fu, B., & Chen, L. (2000). Agricultural landscape spatial pattern analysis in the semi-arid hill area of the Loess Plateau, China. Journal of Arid Environments, 44, 291–303.
GLP. (2005). Science plan and implementation strategy. IGBP Report No. 53/IHDP Report No. 19, Stockholm, 64 pp.
Gutman, G., et al. (2004). Land change science. Observing, monitoring and understanding trajectories of change on the earth’s surface with remote sensing and digital image processing (p. 459). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Hasbani, J.-G. (2008). Semi-automated calibration of a cellular automata model to simulate land-use changes in the Calgary region. Unpublished M.Sc. thesis, Department of Geomatics Engineering, University of Calgary, 96 pp.
Hasbani, J.-G., Wijesekara N., & Marceau, D. J. (2011). An interactive method to dynamically create transition rules in a land-use Cellular Automata model, Cellular Automata – Simplicity Behind Complexity. In Alejandro Salcido (Ed.), ISBN: 978-953-307-230-2, InTech. http://www.intechopen.com/books/cellular-automata-simplicity-behind-complexity/an-interactive-method-to-dynamically-create-transition-rules-in-a-land-use-cellular-automata-model
Imagine Calgary Plan for Long Range Urban Sustainability. (2006). http://www.imaginecalgary.ca/imagineCALGARY_long_range_plan.pdf
Kok, K., & Veldkamp, A. (2001). Evaluating impact of spatial scales on land use pattern analysis in Central America. Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment, 85, 205–221.
Liu, X., Li, X., Shi, X., Zhang, X., & Chen, Y. (2010). Simulating land-use dynamics under planning policies by integrating artificial immune systems with cellular automata. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 24(5), 783–802.
Parks Foundation Calgary. (2008). At home on the Elbow River. http://www.parksfdn.com/At%20Home%20on%20the%20Elbow%20River.pdf
Pawlak, Z. (1982). Rough sets. International Journal of Parallel Programming, 11(5), 341–356.
Plan It Calgary Workbook. (2007). http://www.calgary.ca/PDA/LUPP/Documents/Publications/plan-it-workbook-final.pdf?noredirect=1
Rindfuss, R. R., Walsh, S. J., et al. (2004). Developing a science of land change: Challenges and methodological issues. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 101(39), 13976–13981.
Rocky View County. (2012). Rocky View 2060 – Growth Management Strategy, Rocky View 2060. http://www.rockyview.ca/2060/reports/Final_GMS_Document.pdf
Rocky View County/City of Calgary Intermunicipal Development Plan. (2011). http://www.municipalink.ca/reports/docs/rocky_view_idp_june_2011.pdf
Statistics Canada. (2012). http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2011/dp-pd/hlt-fst/pd-pl/Table-Tableau.cfm?LANG=Eng&T=302&PR=48&S=51&O=A&RPP=25
Trimble. (2012). http://www.ecognition.com.
Veldkamp, A. (2009). Investigating land dynamics: Future research perspectives. Journal of Land Use Science, 4(1–2), 5–14.
Verburg, P. H. (2006). Simulating feedbacks in land use and land cover change models. Landscape Ecology, 21(8), 1171–1183.
Wang, F., & Marceau, D. J. (2012). A patch-based cellular automaton for simulating land-use changes at fine spatial resolution. Transactions in GIS, in press. doi:10.1111/tgis.12009.
Wang, F., Hasbani, J.-G., Wang, X., & Marceau, D. J. (2011). Identifying dominant factors for the calibration of a land-use cellular automata model using rough set theory. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 35(2), 116–125.
Weins, J. A. (1976). Population responses to patchy environments. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 7, 81–120.
Wijesekara, N., Gupta, A., Valeo, C., Hasbani, J. G., Qiao, Y., Delauney, P., & Marceau, D. J. (2012). Assessing the impact of future land-use changes on hydrological processes in the Elbow River watershed in southern Alberta, Canada. Journal of Hydrology, 412–413, 220–232.
Acknowledgements
This research has been funded by three research grants awarded to D. Marceau by GEOIDE, Tecterra, and NSERC Discovery and by an iCORE scholarship awarded to F. Wang from Alberta Innovates. We also thank Alberta Environment Sustainable Resource Development for their financial support and expertise.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Marceau, D.J., Wang, F., Wijesekara, N. (2013). Investigating Land-Use Dynamics at the Periphery of a Fast-Growing City with Cellular Automata at Two Spatial Scales. In: Malkinson, D., Czamanski, D., Benenson, I. (eds) Modeling of Land-Use and Ecological Dynamics. Cities and Nature. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40199-2_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40199-2_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-40198-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-40199-2
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)