Monitoring Urban Expansion of Zanjan City and Assessment of its Urban Areas Scattering Using Statistical and Spatial Analyses during Four Decades

Urban growth as a dynamic phenomenon is an evidence of population growth, economic development and the increasing importance of cities. The goal of this paper is the assessment and evaluation of spatio-temporal expansion of Zanjan city in five time periods using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Shannon's relative entropy. In this research, the aerial photographs of 1973, 1982, 1998, and satellite images of 2008 and 2016 were used to achieve the goal. After data preparation, to determine the amount of expansion in urban areas of Zanjan, ten sides (zones) of growth were taken into account. The hypothesis of zoning the expansion area creates an obvious view of the urban expansion as a whole, the sides of development and the amount of development in each time period. The results of this study show that Zanjan still is not scattered because Shanon rational entropy has not become more than 0.5 till now. The results represent useful guidelines for modeling urban sprawl, understanding the motivations for urbanization and forecasting the patterns of future urban developments.