Abstract:Characteristics of and change in land use and their influencing factors are all closely related to spatial scale. So it's important to choose a proper scale for LUCC study. Small scale, like a county, is good for studying laws of spatio-temporal change, driving force and environmental effect of land use. And by comparison of land use between counties, it would be more easy to find out the law of land use and its change in large-scale regions. County is the basic economic and administrative unit in China, so it could be used as the most effective scale for utilizing, managing and planning land resources. Kunshan City is a typical county and a hot spot for land use study. This paper uses SPSS to compute and analyze changes in land use of Kunshan City in the recent seven years.Such indexes as intensity and change rate of land use and spatial indexes like diversity index, dominance index and homogeneity index are used to describe and analyze land use of Kunshan City. And the following is discovered:
(1) Cultivated land and water surface account for more than 80 percent of the total land area of Kunshan City, with limited land reserves for cultivation. The general land use intensity is high and still increasing. Forest-coverage is far too small in comparison to that of the whole country, and more trees should be planted for the environment of the city.
(2) The change in land use in Kunshan City is fast. And the main direction of change is from cultivated land to land for other uses such as residential area, industry, communications, etc.. The proportion of the traffic land in the city is four times as high as that in some developed countries like France and Japan. It shows that Kunshan City is developing very fast in economy. But enough attention should be paid to the loss of cultivated land. And more ways should be found to solve this problem.
(3) The diversity index of land use in Kunshan City is very high, represents deep interference of human activities and increasing of residential, industrial and traffic land. As the increasing of disturbances from human, the diversity index and the homogeneity index increase, while the dominance index decreases.