A new temporal-spatial dynamics method of simulating land-use change

•A new temporal-spatial dynamics method of simulation land-use change is proposed.•The method implements data bidirectional communication between system dynamics model and cellular automata model.•The cellular automata transition rules are extended by the indicators in system dynamics.•The method can conveniently set different simulation scenarios by changing variables.

The integration of a system dynamics (SD) model, a cellular automata (CA) model, and a Geographic Information System (GIS) is an important topic in the temporal and spatial simulation of land-use changes. Based on many previous studies, the temporal-spatial dynamics method (TSDM) has been proposed as a research framework that removes the limitations of using loosely coupled SD-CA-GIS. In this study, TSDM was successfully implemented in the NetLogo platform. The results show that: (1) Integration SD-CA-GIS based on grids leads to the seamless implementation of real-time data exchange among SD, CA, and GIS; (2) The temporal-spatial dynamic mechanisms can be represented using common time steps in SD-CA-GIS, and TSDM can be used for spatial visualization; and (3) The model accuracy can be improved by extending the CA transition rules with SD. The land-use patterns for 2000, 2010, and 2016 in Beijing, China, were simulated to test the TSDM implementation, and the simulation accuracies were 83.75%, 80.98%, and 77.40%, respectively. The results indicate that TSDM achieves a much better accuracy than conventional SD-CA-GIS coupled models, and is a more practical approach to simulate land-use change.

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