Modelowanie zmian użytkowania przestrzeni rolniczej na przykładzie województwa podlaskiego

The increasing pressure of urbanization processes on agricultural land observed in recent years, is the consequence of rapid economic growth. The protection of valuable soil habitats is not necessarily justified by the interest of agricultural sector but rather by the need of maintaining habitat functions of soils within urbanized areas. This issue is often not adequately addressed by investors and by planners. In this context, development of modeling methods enabling forecasting of land use changes for different scenarios of infrastructure development and planning becomes crucial. This paper demonstrates the application of cellular automata model for the ex ante assessment of agricultural land use changes for two alternative variants of Via Baltica road in podlaskie voivodeship - "łomżyński and białostocki". This article contains an extensive description of algorithms used in the model with special emphasis on assessment of factors controlling attractiveness of a particular administrative unit for urbanization. Results of the modeling suggest that there are negligible differences between these variants in terms of their impact on distribution of demand for urban land in different powiats (counties) of the voivodeship. However, łomżyński route is promoting more balanced development of the whole region. The tested model can be considered as support tool in decision making enabling forecasting and visualization of impacts resulting from different scenarios of spatial planning.