A methodology to quantify the neighborhood decay effect of urban cellular automata models

Spatial heterogeneity is an essential feature of land use change. It is important for cellular automata (CA)-based urban expansion modeling to consider the spatial heterogeneity of neighborhood effect. According to the first law of geography, there exists a distance decay effect in the neighborhood space of the urban CA models. But no research has ever been able to accurately quantify the neighborhood decay effect and apply it to models. In this study, we propose a methodology to accurately quantify the neighborhood decay effect of CA models with large neighborhood size, including the design of neighborhood configuration and the selection and optimization of decay strategies.