Researches On Land Use Change And Its Driving Force In Guangxi Beibu Gulf Economic Zone

With the development of the researches into global environmental changes,the land utilization research, as one of important parts of the former, has beengiven growing attentions by researchers. In recent years, supported by thedevelopments of the technologies of remote sensing and GIS, a thorough andaccurate research into regional land utilization changes can be achieved. Based onBeibu Gulf Economic Zone, by using RS and GIS technologies as well as theERDAS software, this paper categorizes the RS images of the researched zonefrom the year1990,2000and2010respectively and a graph is made to show theland utilization changes of the years mentioned. Furthermore, the paper, by usingthe ARCGIS software, analyses the structural changes, transfer matrix and regionaldifferences of land utilization of2periods, i.e.,1990-2000and2000-2010. Andthen the author uses the Markov Models, in reference to the land transfer matrix, togive out a prediction of the quantitative structure of land utilization of the BaibuGulf for the year2020,2030,2040and2050. After that the paper analyses themain drive forces that affects the land utilization changes of the Beibu Gulf. Thedrive forces fall into two parts: one is the natural drive forces, including climate,landform and soil condition; the other is the social drive forces, including economy,population, level of urbanization, policies, industrial structure and technologydevelopment. Lastly, the paper summarizes the problems in land utilization that theBeibu Gulf Economic Zone is facing and present suggestions for a sustainable landutilization.