Abstract

The extension of agricultural land and the construction of infrastructure are examples of arrogant land use practices that are contributing to deforestation and climate change. The benefits of both cellular and Markov chain analysis are combined in Cellular Automata (CA)-Markov chain, which simulates and forecasts future land use/cover patterns based on historical Land Use Land Cover (LULC) changes. Using IDRISI software and GIS technology, the spatial distribution of LULC and area changed were first computed. The pace of deforestation from 1980 to 2018 was then calculated by evaluating the conversion of forest land cover to other LULC. Second, a CA-Markov chain was run to simulate the spatial distribution of land use and cover in 2018 utilizing transition potential matrices for the years 1999 to 2018. Using the 2018 simulated LULC map with the real LULC