Abstract: Types of land uses are extracted from remote sensing images obtained in 1987, 1998 and 2000. The land uses conversion matrixes in the study area over two time periods, 1987~1998 and 1998~2000 were analyzed based on GIS. During the 1987~2000 period, the proportion of lands with conversions was as high as 5.84% among the total lands. The settlement and built-up areas increased distinctly and farmlands decreased obviously in the last 13 years. There are two major types of land use changes—conversion from farmlands to settlement and built-up areas, water surface areas, tea gardens and orchards, and conversion from bare lands to forest lands. These two types of land use changes constitute about 89.96% to the total changes. Farmlands loss has been the largest figure among different types of changes during this period. 9294.48 hm2 of farmlands lost in the study area, accounting for 9.36% of the total farmlands. Smaller area underwent changes from water surface areas to farmlands, forestlands to farmlands, and bare lands to settlement and built-up areas, ponds and reservoirs. The main driving force of land use changes is the policy shifts due to demand of social-economic development and population growth.

Key words: fast urbanization, land uses, dynamic changes