Peri-urban agricultural land vulnerability due to urban sprawl – a multi-criteria spatially-explicit scenario analysis

The loss of agricultural land at urban fringes is often monitored but rarely analysed under different scenarios of urban sprawl. This study adopts a multi-criteria spatially-explicit approach to investigate agricultural land vulnerability to urban sprawl under opposing policy directions in the Adelaide metropolitan area. Six land-use change parameters representing the socio-economic and land-use planning effects were analysed under the scenarios of; Business-As-Usual (BAU), Accelerated Economic Development (EDS) and a high Environmental Protection Scenario (EPS). The study shows higher agricultural land vulnerabilities in EDS and BAU scenarios that extends into rural areas displaying a leap-frog effect, which confirms the need to sacrifice farm land uses to maintain land supply for urban development. The LGA-based results enable transfer of farmland vulnerability knowledge into practice by identifying high priority areas for land management interventions and by specifying the types of agricultural land to be strategically managed in these urban fringe landscapes.