“…Over recent decades, GIS and remote sensing (RS) technologies have been used as the main components of geo-simulation modeling processes to integrate spatiotemporal data and analyze the physical growth of cities (Arsanjani, Helbich, & de Noronha Vaz, 2013;Arsanjani, Fibaek, & Vaz, 2018;Xu, Huang, Ding, Mei, & Qin, 2018). Several models have been integrated into GIS to predict land use/cover changes and urban growth; examples include artificial neural networks (ANNs) (Pijanowski, Brown, Shellito, & Manik, 2002), agent-based models (Arsanjani, Helbich, & de Noronha Vaz, 2013;Benenson, 1998), statistical models (Cheng & Masser, 2003), slope-land use-excluded-urban-transportation and hillshade (SLEUTH) (Liu et al, 2017), dynamic urban evolutionary modeling (DUEM) (Xie, 1996), conversion of land use and its effects (CLUE) (Veldkamp & Fresco, 1996), conversion of land use and its effects at small regional extent (CLUE-S) (Verburg, 2002), multi-city sustainable regional urban growth simulation (MSRUGS) (Xie & Fan, 2014), land change modeler (LCM) (Abuelaish & Olmedo, 2016;Wang & Maduako, 2018), multinomial logistic regression (Mustafa et al, 2018), Dinamica® (Rodrigues & Soares-Filho, 2018), spatially explicit regional growth model (SERGoM) (Theobald, 2005), land-use change analysis system (LUCAS) (Sleeter, Wood, Soulard, & Wilson, 2017), cellular automata (CA)-Markov (Arsanjani, Helbich, Kainz, et al, 2013;Firozjaei, Nematollahi, et al, 2019) and direction-based CA-Markov (Firozjaei, Kiavarz, Alavipanah, Lakes, & Qureshi, 2018).…”