Abstract: The fast growth of construction land is a significant character in recent land use variation in Jiangsu province. The total area of its urban construction land increased from 426 km2 in 1985 to 2 200 km2 in 2003. The annul increase area was reached at 98.56 km2. Because city is a complex system and the increase of construction land area was propelled by social, economic and human factors. So it is difficult to predict the construction land area by traditional methods. In this paper, the back propagation algorithm (BP) was introduced to predict the urban construction land area in Jiangsu province. At the same time, the multiregression analysis model was also set up to check the precision of BP neural prediction model. The results showed that the relative error between the value predicted by the BP neural network and the actual value was only 3.96%. It also showed that the BP neural network has a high precision and good effectiveness than the multiregression analysis. The result of the research can be referred as an effective tool for the government regulations on the land use plan.

Key words: BP neural network, prediction, construction land area, Jiangsu Province