Land use change and its driving forces in Beijing during 1996-2006

With significant socioeconomic development and increasing population, land use change is the crucial land management issue in Beijing. The new characteristics of land use change during 1996-2006 and its driving forces in Beijing were analyzed by land use surveying data, which was more accurate and can reflect the real content about land use than remote sensing images. In order to investigate the quantitative information, the direction and spatial pattern of land use change, the transition matrix, landscape metrics and centroid model are chosen in this paper. The study indicates: 1) The land use types of Beijing converted frequently. The area of cropland and grassland lost evidently; much of them converted into residential and industrial land. 2) The number of patches increased rapidly in Beijing during these years. Most land use types had the fragment tendency except for traffic land and residential and industrial land. 3) Centroid model represented the spatial expansion of the cropland and residential and industrial land. The study proposed that increasing population and developing economy were the main driving forces of land use change in Beijing these years.