Abstract:

With an area of 36 895 square kilometers, Taihu Lake basin extends across East China's regions including Jiangsu and Zhejiang Provinces and Shanghai Municipality. Of all the land, Jiangsu accounts for 53 percent, while zhejiang accounts for 33 percent and Shanghai 14 percent. It can be divided into four kinds of underlying surfaces, such as cultivated land, construction land, water area and other land. In 1999, the flood protection planning in Taihu Lake basin was announced and the data of land area was wildly used. To discover the real change of land use, we used the investigation data from the bureau of land management in 2005. It showed that the cultivated land was the most important underlying surface in Taihu basin, the contradiction between agricultural land and construction land was much serious, and water area was large, accounting for 14.5 percent of the total area. From 1996 to 2005, the cultivated land had decreased a lot, especially in Jiangsu province; the construction land had increased for about 30 percent in Taihu lake basin, while water area was slightly decreased. The population increased, urbanization development, quick economic development, profit driven and difference of land control had given rise to this change