Urban Expansion Prediction and Land Use/Land Cover Change Modeling for Sustainable Urban Development

Dear Colleagues,

The dynamic and convoluted process of urban expansion, which happens via the conversion of land covers to land uses, imposes adverse impacts on the natural environment, such as deforestation, habitat fragmentation, natural hazards, agricultural fields loss, and regional and global warming. Alleviating these impacts and maintaining sustainable urban development necessitates the development of reliable analytical methods for understanding the process of land conversion and predicting the location, extent, and intensity of urban expansion. Perceiving the urban expansion process and predicted probability maps can help practitioners and decision makers toward systematic urban planning, efficient management, and policies providing sustainable urban development. This requires modeling land use/land cover change to recognize the driving forces of land conversion and explore their relative importance, investigating change trends, predicting urban expansion patterns, and simulating a variety of urban expansion scenarios. Studies mainly focused on urban expansion prediction and land conversion modeling but did not cover the impacts on the natural environment and sustainable growth. This Special Issue invites submissions addressing urban expansion and land use/land cover change considering sustainable urban development. This includes but is not limited to:

• Spatiotemporal land use/land cover change simulation;
• Land use/land cover change detection and monitoring urban expansion; 
• Urban expansion impacts on the natural environment;
• Urban expansion prediction using machine learning;
• Urban expansion prediction using deep learning;
• Scenario-based simulation for supporting sustainable urban expansion;
• Causal factors of urban expansion and land conversion;
• Urban expansion and climate change;
• Urban expansion and public health.

Dr. Firoozeh Karimi
Prof. Dr. Selima Sultana
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.