Abstract:

Land use change can have adverse impact on society and environment and therefore this puts enormous pressure on governments. Accurate estimates of future urban expansion are essential for sustainable growth and the preservation of the environment. This article examines the land use changes for urban uses, and further applies different methods for the projection of residential and industrial/commercial land uses in the selected case study area i.e. NUTS3 (nomenclature of terrestrial units for statistics) regions of Turkey. Density measures, trend extrapolation and regression analysis are the subject statistical methods used for projecting the land use. The findings show that using the chosen methodologies to project past changes leads in significant uncertainty. The results are significantly influenced by the variation in selected variables, and spatial organization of the study region. Therefore, validation analysis as a future research focus will be essential to select the most appropriate model that can be used to project the land use changes in Turkey. The results from the current analysis can be adopted by the government and local authorities for the land management and sustainable growth of urban land use in the Turkish regional context.

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