Spatiotemporal dynamics and driving forces of land use/cover in Panyu District of Guangzhou City

Land use / cover change(LUCC) is one of key issues of global change research.With the acceleration of urbanization,the study of LUCC spatiotemporal dynamics in rapid urbanization area has gained more attention.In this study,four sets of Landsat TM images(1990/2000/2005/2008) were processed to identify LUCC spatiotemporal dynamics in Panyu District.The results showed that the area of built-up land and water were increased by 182.6 percent(from 8577 ha to 24244 ha) and 39.8 percent(from 11620 ha to 16253 ha) respectively,but the area of cropland was decreased by 44.2 percent(from 41014 ha to 22868 ha) from 1990 to 2008.Additionally,the land use transition matrix showed that a great amount of cropland and vegetation was transformed to build-up land during the periods. The integrated dynamic indexes were conducted to evaluate the intensity of land use change in different periods,and the results showed that land use dynamics was more acute from 2000 to 2008 than before.Furthermore,correlation analysis of land use change and urbanization process was carried out.There was a remarkably negative correlation between the area of cropland and urbanization process, and a positive correlation between the area of urban built-up and urbanization process.Vegetation was decreased first and then increased during the urbanization process.The results demonstrated that urbanization process was the main driving force of land use change,and that policy and economic benefits were important factors for land use change.