Authors: Ramin Nourqolipour Abdul Rashid B Mohamed Shariff Siva K Balasundram Noordin B Ahmad Alias M Sood Taher Buyong Fazel Amiri
Publish Date: 2014/07/30
Volume: 73, Issue: 4, Pages: 1687-1700
Abstract
In Malaysia areas under oil palm plantations have increased dramatically since the early twentieth century and have resulted in multiple conversions of land change This paper presents a spatial and temporal model for simulation of oil palm expansion in the Kuala Langat district Malaysia The model is an integration of cellular automata CA multicriteria evaluation MCE and Markov chain MC analysis while MCE provides transition rules of CA iterations and MC analysis assigns a transition probability to each single pixel at the time steps Evaluation criteria consist of constraints and nine suitability factors indicating environmental and socioeconomic issues of oil palm development In the first simulation changes of six landcover classes were projected to the year 2008 based on transitions between 1997 and 2002 Two measures of quantity disagreement and allocation disagreement were adopted to validate model outcome The simulation of landcover change of the year 2020 was done based on the transition observed between 1997 and 2002 regarding the satisfactory agreement of the projection and the reference data at the first simulation The results based on five landscape metrics indicated continuous spatial patterns of oil palm plantations but more fragmented spatial patterns of other land classes by the year 2020
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