Introduction: Land use and land cover change (LUCC) is a complex issue resulted from biophysical, socioeconomic, cultural, organizational and technological factors in different spatial and temporal scales. LUCCs have both direct and indirect effects on the environment not only globally but also locally. LUCC is considered as an important threat to biodiversity as causing the fragmentation, natural vegetation destruction and natural areas isolation. The regions which managed by environmental protection organizations all over the world are established based on a common goal to maintain biodiversity. Current insufficient preservative and management actions in the protected areas (especially in Iran) are unable to guarantee the areas protection. Therefore, analyzing previous and current land use and land cover (LULC) status and predicting the future pattern within and surrounding protected areas are likely to provide more efficient information for proper natural resources management. RS data is cost effective means to detect changes on the Earth's surface and provide up to date information. Over the last decades, several methods and models are developed for extracting LULC maps, detecting LUCCs and modelling the future pattern using remotely sensed data. The objective of this study is to analyze spatiotemporal patterns of LUCC from the past to the future within Dizmar protected area in Iran. Firstly, LULC maps of 1989, 2000 and 2013 were extracted and then future LULC was predicted using CA-Markov models from 2013 to 2037....