The Phoenix Urban Growth Model (PHX-UGM) is a spatially explicit, cellular automaton model designed to simulate land use change in the Phoenix metropolitan area. The model is a modified version of Human-Induced Land Transformations (HILT), a rule-based urban growth model originally developed for the San Francisco Bay Area by Keith Clarke et al (1997).The urban growth rules involve selecting a location, investigating the spatial properties of the neighboring cells, and urbanizing the cell under consideration based on a set of weighted probabilities. Using land use and other data collected for the Phoenix area, existing growth rules were selectively modified and new rules were added to help examine key ecological and social factors that affect urbanization. |
Urban Growth continues to advance through agricultural and desert land in the Phoenix area