Tempo-spatial patterns of landscape changes and urban development (Case study: Gorgan)

Landscape includes a mosaic of landscape elements in a context of a major land use/cover. Much emphasis has been placed on developing methods to quantify landscape patterns in recent years. Landscape elements include various types, including urban areas and patches, which were used for change's identification in the current study. Any urban area has been considered a landscape patch and their patterns for the Gorgan city between the years 1987 and 2001 have been compared in this study. Number, shape and neighborhood metrics was the major groups of metrics calculated. To do so, urban areas were fed to Fargstats Software as patches. Comparison showed that development pattern in Gorgan city has led to the creation of larger and simpler patches with and less fractal dimension during the 14-years period of our study. In fact, urban growth was shown to be adhering to the previous urban patches. This is also visible to the spatial investigation of the largest patches (a complex of continues areas), such that, for example, two large patches in 1987 had been joined because of infill. Despite the tendency of urban growth around previous urban patches and in their vicinity, patches did not show a uniform distribution in the area, rather, they were irregular. This result is confirmed by the fact that the urban area has increased 2.1 times during the study period.