Advancing urban planning in arid agricultural-urbanized landscapes of Iran: Spatial modeling evidence from a rapidly developing region

Binary agricultural-urbanized landscapes in the central arid zone of Iran are under the imminent threat of fragmentation and low crop yields due to uncontrolled low-density urban expansion. To characterize the current process in a case study area in Central Isfahan (1550 km 2 ), two scenarios of Business As Usual (BAU) and Agricultural Land Protection (ALP) were simulated using the SLEUTH model and compared statistically to provide relevant urban planning insights. A time-series (1992- 2022) Landsat NDVI-based procedure was developed to characterize the annual cropping intensity of land parcels as a surrogate for agricultural land suitability, showing that only 16.7% of the region (303 parcels with a mean cropping NDVI of 0.184) has a high agricultural suitability. Landsat-derived urban areas also showed a significant road-influenced outlying pattern during the study period, especially in high cropping intensity areas with the SLEUTH Breed and Road Gravity scores of 100 and 60, respectively. By reducing these scores to half, the ALP scenario was developed and together with the BAU was projected up to the year 2045. Results showed significant restrictive growth of new road-influenced urban patches under the APL scenario which also targeted least-suitable agricultural areas, especially in high cropping intensity parcels ( z = -6.657, p =0.000, sig≤ 0.05, 2-tailed).