Monitoring and predicting land use change in Beijing using remote sensing and GIS

Rapid land use change has taken place in many mega cities of China such as Beijing over the past two decades. In this paper, land use change dynamics were investigated by the combined use of satellite remote sensing, geographic information systems (GIS). The results indicated that there had been a notable and uneven urban growth and a major loss of cropland loss between 1986 and 2001. Most of the urban growth and loss of agriculture land occurred in inner and outer suburbs. Land use change was projected for the next 20 years using Markov chains and regression analyses. The further integration of remote sensing and GIS technologies with Markov model and regression model was found to be useful for describing, analyzing and predicting the process of land use change.