Predicting the Spatial Pattern of Urban Growth in Honolulu County Using the Cellular Automata SLEUTH Urban Growth Model

Abstract

This thesis examines SLEUTH as an urban modeling tool using the island of Oahu as a specific example and seeks to answer the following questions: 1. How accurately does SLEUTH predict urban growth on Oahu? 2. How does this accuracy change for select geographic sub-areas that are calibrated and modeled independently from the whole island? 3. What urbanization pattern does the model predict on Oahu in the year 2025? Oahu offers a unique application for studying this model. SLEUTH is scale independent and suitable for both regional and global inquiries. Published research using SLEUTH to model land use change have focused on San Francisco (Clarke et al. 1994), Washington D.C.lBaltimore (Clarke and Gaydos, 1998; Jantz et al. 2004), Lisbon and Porto, Portugal (Silva and Clarke 2001), and Atlanta (Yang and Lo, 2003). While each of these studies sought to explore urban growth at a regional level or with a different type of urban geometry, none sought to experiment with it on an area where both urban geography and topography interface with such wide variations as are found on Oahu. Implementing SLEUTH for Oahu offers a regional environment to explore the model's versatility to work in an area with varied and discrete urban areas which developed at different temporal scales, coupled with a diverse topography, to provide insight to the applicability of the model for other similar regions.