The Spatial-Temporal Characteristic of Land Use Change in Beijing and Its Driving Mechanism

Land use change is a key component for global change, and it is a significant form of the impact of human activities on physical environment. As the closely link between human and nature, human activities has influenced the evolution of land use from the city, regional, national and even global scale, thus to explore the driving mechanism and spatial-temporal change process of land use has become an important field in the study of global change. Taking Beijing city as an example, based on remote sensing data of 1985, 2000 and 2010 of Beijing and with the technology of GIS, the paper revealed the characteristics of the land use change in the past 25 years and conducts the driving force analysis from the range and rate of land use change, the direction of land use transformation. The results showed that: 1) Big changes have taken place in land use pattern in Beijing from 1985 to 2010. The area of forest increased slightly, while the farmland area and water area decreased more rapidly, and the expansion of construction land was most evident. 2) The integrated dynamic degree of land use in Beijing increased from 0.99 during 1985-2000 to 1.64 during 2000-2010, which indicated the rate of land use change had accelerated. From the single dynamic degree of land use, forest land and construction land increased gradually, the rate was increased from 0.14% and 3.78% to 0.21% and 4.01% respectively,while the area of farmland, grassland and water decreased, but the rate of land use was increased from 0.8342%,0.2367%, 1.1401% during 1985-2000 to 1.5291%, 0.3767%, 3.4043% during 2000-2010. 3) From transition matrix of the land use types, the direction of land use change showed similar characteristics in two periods, the farmland was always an important source that converted to other land types such as construction land, forest land and water area. However, the area of conversion of construction land to other land types was 13.8 times during 2000-2010 than 1985-2000, which showed land consolidation has become the main means to improve the efficiency of land use in recent years. 4) Finally,we find the driving mechanism of land use change in Beijing city can attribute to many factors such as the rapid population growth, economic development, and government policy.