With the aid of GIS and the mathematic statistics method, the land use variation indexing model and the spatial pattern indexes of the landscape ecology were used to study characters of LUCC in Tianquan County from 1992 to 2002. The results showed that the proportion of forest land was the biggest and increasing every year but with a very limited rate of change, being only 0.29 %. It had reached 79.14 % by 2002. The proportion of cultivated land was merely 5.50 % and decreased by 813.3 hm² in the decade. But its annual variation rate was much higher than that of forest land, reaching up to 2.68 %. Under the impact of human activities, the diversity index and evenness index showed a rising trend, but the dominance index decreased within the decade between 1992 and 2002. Through analysis, it could be inferred that the driving forces of LUCC include natural factors, like landform, nature disaster etc, and social economic factors, such as population growth, urbanization, government behavior and so on. On such a basis, pertinent suggestions for ecological development were put forward.