An Exploratory use of SLEUTH Urban Growth Model in the Spatiotemporal Growth Simulation of Greater Karu Urban Area

SLEUTH is a self-modifying cellular automaton model developed and widely applied to predict urban growth in different cities across the globe. The model as the name implies is calibrated using historical data layers as control. In this study, the model was calibrated for Karu region, which is indeed the first successful calibration of the model in Nigeria. The main objective of the calibration was to find coefficient values that best model urban and related landcover change through time in study area. The calibration was executed in coarse, fine and final phases, with each phase applied datasets of different resolution. The calibration produced initializing coefficient values that best simulate historical growth of Karu and the best fit values were used in the prediction phase. Using average values derived from calibration at full resolution with 100 Monte carlo iterations, year 2012 was set as prediction start date and growth forecasted to year 2073, with probabilistic maps of cells being urbanized in the future produced