This study investigates the effect of static and dynamic land use management on agricultural land use change and the type of crop selected in Najaf-Abad Hydrological Unit in southwest of Isfahan Province. To do so, a Multi-Criteria Decision Making Procedure was first utilized to delineate the suitability of land for agriculture. A set of Landsat 8 OLI imagery data from 2012 to 2016 was then used to produce currently used agricultural lands. The results of the comparison of these maps, as a basis of representing agricultural land use management showed that regions with better ecological and infrastructure assets have been significantly (p?0.05) less affected from adverse environmental impacts such as water resource shortage. To investigate dynamic land use management, the effect of urban growth and land abandonment were analyzed separately (in the years of 2030, 2040 and 2050) and integratedly. The results of this section showed that following an environmentally sound scenario, as an alternative optimized storyline, would lead to more satisfactory results in agricultural land use protection. The results of the integrated procedure showed that over 44 thousand ha of agricultural areas are under the risk of both land degradation and abandonment by 2050, however, by following an environmentally sound procedure, this extent could be decreased below 35 ha. To investigate the effect of management on agricultural land use components, an attempt was made to compare a crop type map produced from a multi-temporal Landsat 8 image classification and an optimized crop type maps derived from NSGA-II genetic algorithm calibrated with an array of ecological and socio-economic functions for wheat, alfalfa, potato, fruit trees, vegetables and rice. The results of this section showed that there is a relative consistency between crop types selected by farmers and the optimized crop type pattern. However, some notable inconsistencies were detected which were mostly related to improper site selection of infrastructure assets. In total, the results of this research effort showed that environmental constraints direct farmers towards a sustainable use of agricultural lands, however some strict prohibitions are needed to inform local farmers especially when constraints are mitigated and farmers have a variety of options to use more lands and select different crop types. Finally, it should be noted that this research is only a representation of the type of agricultural land use management directed by local farmers and further research need to manage and optimize the socio-economic relationship between decision makers and local farmers
