%0 Journal Article %T Performance comparison of land change modeling techniques for land use projection of arid watersheds %J Global Journal of Environmental Science and Management %I GJESM Publisher (Professor J. Nouri) %Z 2383-3572 %A Tajbakhsh, S.M. %A Memarian, H. %A Moradi, K. %A Aghakhani Afshar, A.H. %D 2018 %\ 07/01/2018 %V 4 %N 3 %P 263-280 %! Performance comparison of land change modeling techniques for land use projection of arid watersheds %K Artificial neural network-multi layer perceptron (ANN-MLP) %K CA-Markov %K Fuzzy-analytic hierarchy process (Fuzzy-AHP) %K Land use change %K Simulation %R 10.22034/GJESM.2018.03.002 %X The change of land use/land cover has been known as an imperative force in environmental alteration, especially in arid and semi-arid areas. This research was mainly aimed to assess the validity of two major types of land change modeling techniques via a three dimensional approach in Birjand urban watershed located in an arid climatic region of Iran. Thus, a Markovian approach based on two suitability and transition potential mappers, i.e. fuzzy analytic hierarchy process and artificial neural network-multi layer perceptron was used to simulate land use map. Validation metrics, quantity disagreement, allocation disagreement and figure of merit in a three-dimensional space were used to perform model validation. Utilizing the fuzzy-analytic hierarchy processsimulation of total landscape in the target point 2015, quantity error, the figure of merit and allocation error were 2%, 18.5% and 8%, respectively. However, Artificial neural network-multi layer perceptron simulation led to a marginal improvement in figure of merit, i.e. 3.25%. %U https://www.gjesm.net/article_31528_5b726f6ce9789ee06ae721ba73469d0b.pdf