Urban Land Use Change in Chengdu City Using Satellite Data

Land use change is a major issue in global environment change and is especially significant in rapidly developing urban regions of China was being witnessed. With its economic development, population growth, and urbanization in Chengdu, capital of the western province of Sichuan, China, have experienced a dramatic land use change over the past 30 years. Assessment on urban land use change is essential for policy makers to support sustainable development. In this paper, urban land use change in Chengdu using Landsat TM/ETM+images (2000-2008) based on RS and GIS is discussed. The result shows that the spatiotemporal change of urban land use was significant, the conversion between cultivated land and built-up land was intensive, more and more agriculture land was converted to non-agriculture land, therefore, urban area expands was very fast. It is also noted that decrease area of cultivated land was 12.025×10⁴ hm², increase area of built-up land was 6.195×10⁴ hm² over the past 8 years resulting in large scale urban land use. The information of urban land use change based on RS and GIS is very useful to urban government and urban planners.