development and sustaining limited agricultural resources, especially farmlands.The GIM was selected as
a study area because (1) nearly 40% of Jordan's primary croplands located in Irbid, (2) it is
the second-fastest-growing urban area in the country, (3) it has been experiencing rapid
socioeconomic and demographic transformations, and (4) its zoning and urban planning
policies are not well designed, not fully enforced, and their sustainability perspectives are
not pronounced.Since 2001,
the GIM area has undergone significant land cover changes to support the growing urban
population resulting from (1) economic development (2) domestic rural-urban migration,
(3) changing demographic structure, (4) changing lifestyle, and (5) the influx of Syrian
refugees during the Arab Spring of 2011 [58].The
SLEUTH model is applied for the first time in Jordan, providing a robust approach for
making long-term sustainable urban planning strategies that integrate spatially explicit
models and geospatial technologies.While numerous case-studies investigated urban growth in Irbid using remote sensing
and GIS [59-63], no study has yet used the SLEUTH model to predict urban dynamics and
quantify the past, present, and future urban expansion on agricultural land of Jordan.Nevertheless, and due to increasing conversion rates of farmlands to
urbanization, countless efforts have been paid towards modeling long-term land-use/cover
dynamics, in general, and urbanization, in particular, in these countries [44-47].Accordingly, the municipal boundary of Irbid city was adjusted
resulting in integrating agriculturally dominant rural districts to the city limits.This becomes more problematic when the Arab countries neglect the importance of proper
management through balancing between available agricultural lands and conversion
for urban use [44].