Geo-visualization of landscape dynamics in the proposed mega industrial corridor

Urbanization is associated with large-scale irreversible landscape changes in response to the demands of burgeoning population, etc. Lack of basic amenities, job, and infrastructures in rural areas often drives migration towards the urbanizing landscapes. Urbanization is resource centric, which involves, large-scale transformation of the landscape with the irreversible impacts on the regional ecology, hydrology, and environment, which is evident from large-scale land cover changes leading to deforestation, encroachment of lakes/water bodies, forest, and farmlands, conversion of agriculture landscapes, etc. damaging the environs. Visualization of urban growth based on the past spatial patterns would help in evolving appropriate policy framework towards the design of sustainable cites for the prudent management of natural resources. Current communication attempts to understand the landscape dynamics along the proposed Mumbai-Pune industrial corridor (with 10 km buffer) through (i) rule-based/non agent-based models (non-ABM) and (ii) agent-based models (ABM) with the evaluation of relative performance of ABM and non-ABM methods. Comparative assessment of the model performance through accuracy assessment and Kappa (relatively significant at p < 0.05) indicates the superior performance of the agent-based model approaches due to its interaction with factors and constraints that allow urban growth in the region. Non-ABM model predicted the growth of 49.69% by 2027 with the decline of vegetation to 9.63%. Compared to this, agent-based model predicted growth in urban landscape to 47.12% and the decline of vegetation to 11.10%. The current research was formulated based on the recommendations of the deliberation between academia and stakeholder industries that are likely to be benefitted by the implementation of the industrial corridor. The research outcome also helps local planning authorities in advance visualization of urban dynamics to design sustainable urban regions with the provision of appropriate infrastructure and basic amenities.