Modeling Future Urban Expansion based on Global Settlement Products – A Comparative Study

The study aims at the calibration, validation, implementation and future simulation of urban sprawl in the Ruhr until 2030 based on global urban input data sets. For the first time, historic OSM data is utilized for the implementation of an urban cellular automaton. The urban CA SLEUTH UGMr has been calibrated with the Global Human Settlement Layer, the World Settlement Footprint Evolution, Open Street Map data and Digital Land Cover Model for Germany to compare the results in terms of accuracy and quantity. While all models reach very high simulation performance levels, the amount of new settlements reach from 40.77 km
²
to 121.90 km
²
demonstrating how the coefficients calibrated with different data sets affect future simulations.