Coupling geosimulation and optimization (GeoSOS) for zoning and alerting of agricultural conservation areas

Rapid urban expansion in China has caused the significant loss of agricultural land. Specific efforts are made by the country to protect its scarce and valuable agricultural land. The State Council promulgated the Ordinance for the Protection of Primary Agricultural Land in 1994 to promote the zoning of agricultural conservation areas. However, the agricultural land still underwent a rapid loss due to the urgent demand of local economic development. The conflict between protection and local development calls for solution. This paper provides a new thought of integrating urban development into the zoning of agricultural conservation areas, and Panyu district in Guangdong province is selected for a case study. The proposed Agent-based Land Allocation (AgentLA) model is used to automatically generate the spatial distribution of agricultural conservation areas. Compared to conventional methods, the resulted pattern from AgentLA is more compact that favors routing maintenance of the conservation areas. Moreover, the future development of the region is predicted using Geographical Simulation and Optimization System (GeoSOS), a platform for geosimulation. Finally, GIS provides the function to combine the zoning result and the predicted development pattern in order to recognize the spatial distribution of the conflict areas.