Land Use Change Detection and Prediction Around Lenggong UNESCO World Heritage Site Using ANN–CA Modelling

Lenggong Valley is an important heritage landscape in Malaysia commonly recognized for its outstanding archaeological, cultural, and environmental significance. However, increasing land use pressure around heritage areas may affect landscape authenticity, environmental quality, and long-term conservation planning. This study aims to analyze historical land use change and predict future land use patterns within the Lenggong catchment, a sub-catchment of the Sungai Perak catchment. Land use data for 2000, 2010, and 2020 were obtained from PlanMalaysia and reclassified into five major classes: water bodies, agriculture, forest, built-up areas, and vacant land. The ANN model was calibrated using the 2000 and 2010 land use maps, while the simulated 2020 map was validated against the observed 2020 map using Kappa statistics. Following validation, the 2010–2020 transition pattern and cellular-automata neighborhood effects were used to predict land use for 2040 through two consecutive 10-year simulation iterations. The results showed that forest and agriculture remained the dominant land use classes in the catchment. However, forest decreased from 58.9% in 2000 to 54.4% in 2020, while agriculture increased from 33.3% to 35.5%. Built-up areas also increased from 1.8% to 3.5% and were predicted to reach 3.8%. The model also denoted acceptable performance, with an overall Kappa value of 0.71 and validation accuracy of 83.1%. Within the 1 km heritage buffer, built-up areas increased from 3.6% in 2000 to 10.5% in 2020, with a projected increase to 13.2%. Overall, the findings highlight increasing development pressure around the Lenggong heritage landscape and provide useful spatial evidence for heritage-sensitive planning and long-term conservation management.