Changes Of Land Use/Land Cover In North Transitional Zone Of Red Soil Hiily Region

The change of ecology and environment affected by human activities has been focal point and key content in the study of global ecology and Geography, and Land use and Land cover (LUCC) taken on natural and social attributes are reflected intensely by human activities and natural environment which act or react on each other. LUCC is the focal point of the global research, which offers not only abundant regional information for the integrated research of LUCC, but also the effective channel into the research of global environmental change.Red soil hilly region, located in the tropical and subtropical zones of Southeast China, consists of 9 provinces and 1 autonomous region. This region is about 1.13 million km~2, and hold 11.8% of country and 30% of the population. There are large regions with excellent water and heat conditions in red earth hilly area of China, which is the important area of agriculture produced in China, and the main base of industrial crops and nontimber forest in tropic and subtropics of China. The north edge of this region is the remarkable transition of the climate from middle subtropics to north subtropics and topography from the west plateau land to the east plain and hilly land. As a special zone of eco-environment, there are some obvious characters of transition in term of the agricultural ecological model, the composition of flora, cultural structure and economic state. For long time, because of the land resources of the utilization and exploitation, the dry sloping fields area is large, and the study area isn't so reasonable that ecosystem environment breaks severely. The land degeneration becomes the biggest obstacle to develop in this area. But, because of natural conditional complexity in southern region and the cognitive difference of people, in early days a lot of studies mostly are caught out in the typical red soil district of southern region, neglecting the north edge of red soil hilly region, especially the transitional zone of the north edge of the subtropics.For the north edge of red soil hilly region, selecting Xianning city for the study object, this paper demonstrate the characters of land cover change in study area using the MSS image inl978, the TM image in 1991 and the ETM image in 2002.Then supported with CIS technology, combined with social and economic data, using the development degree and barycenter index of land use, the paper indicate from 1978 to 2002 the characters of space-time change of land use in study area. In order to show the status of all kinds of land uses in the whole change of the study area, the paper use the method of Markov conversion matrix integrated with ArcGIS technology, and the...