As the core of coupled human-environment systems, land use and land cover change has become a potential field as land change science (LCS) in the study of global environmental change. National-scale land use/land cover change information in the early 21st century was updated and integrated based on the high-resolution remotely sensed images.

Prof. LIU Jiyuan and his research group, from Institute of Geographic Sciences and Resources Research and other institutes of CAS, have engaged in the study on land use and land cover change for many years. They have developed a methodology for land use change monitoring based on remotely sensed data every 5 years since late 1980s, also they designed a new technique for data fusion that converts vector data into a series of grid data with 1 km×1 km resolution on national scale without destroying the acreage information.

Now the research team has established the land use dataset in 2005 that is the latest data for the whole China, so the pattern of land use change in the first five years (2000–2005) of the 21st century can be captured, which can reveal the temporal-spatial characteristics and driving forces of land use change.

The researchers analyzed the main driving forces as the implementation of the strategy on land use and regional development based on a new dynamic regionalization.

The results indicated that:

(1) In the first 5 years of the 21st century, land use changes was characterized by highly intensified and accelerated alterations, and significant spatial variations as well, induced by regional exploitation strategy and rapid socio-economic development.

(2) The general trend of land use change at national scale during 2000–2005 was the reduction of arable land area, especially of paddy land area in southern China; built-up area indicated a rapid increase and occupied large area of high-quality cultivated land, especially in the southeast coastal areas, inland plain and traditional farming zones; The development of oasis agriculture in Northwest China and the reclamation in Northeast China led to a slight increase in arable land area in northern China. To some extent, woodland area was increased as a result of the “Grain for Green” Project in the middle and western developing regions, where the vegetation coverage was substantially enlarged. Likewise, grassland was decreased as the conversion from grassland to cropland.

(3) The implementation of a series of socio-economic and regional development policies resulted in accelerated growth of the socio-economy and hence caused the considerable changes in land use, such as policies of “Western Development”, “Revitalization of Northeast”, coupled with rapidly economic development during this period.

It was expected that the land use datasets in 1970s and 2008 will be completed soon afterwards, so the land use change process for the whole 30 years after the era of Reform and Opening-up can be achieved in  the future.