THE DRIVING FORCES OF LAND USE/COVER CHANGE INTHE UPSTREAM AREA OF THE NENJIANG RIVER

IINTRODUCTION niques in China（ZHANG。t al，1999； CHEN et al，2000b）．Since the early 1990s，he acceleration of land With its abundant forest，land and water re－use／cover change（LUL乙）has spurred renewed con－sources，the area of the Nenjlang River valley Is one ofcerns about the role ofland use change Indrlvingmany the lmpoFtant lumber products and commodity grainenvironmental problems．Research on the causes and ba…

The driving forces of land use/cover change in the upstream area of the Nenjiang River

Based on the Landsat 5 and Landsat 7 TM images, the land use/cover change was detected in the upstream area of the Nenjiang River between 1995 and 2000. With the spatial analysis techniques of GIS, the maps of land use degree and its change within this period were produced. To identify the causes of changes, elevation and slope were regarded as the main natural influencing factors and were transformed from coverage format to grid format within GIS. The Thiesson polygon method was used to the spatial allocation of socio-economic factors including human population, live-stock numbers, mechanizing power of farming and the nearest distance from the changed pixel to the trunk stream and to main settlements, thereby the spatial relationship between land use degree change and socio-economic factor variation was analyzed. According to results of the spatial correlation, the determinants of changes in land use/cover, i. e. elevation, slope, population density change, livestock increase were extracted quantitatively in this area. At last, the spatial multi-linear regression model of land use degree change was developed as follows: Δ La=11.037−4.512* elevation-0.298* slope+0.292* Δ population+2.596* Δlivestock.