Simulating land use/cover changes of Nenjiang County based on CA-Markov model

Abstract

Nenjiang County experienced intense land use/cover changes during 1985-2000.The remote sensing and GIS methods were used to find the changes temporally and spatially. The result indicates: the forests were fallen in a large area, from 49.46% to 39.03% of total land area. Simultaneously, the croplands were increased rapidly from 26.02% to 37.42%. The conversion of forests and croplands were the main activities of landuse. Oppositely, Urbanization resulted in the decrease of the croplands in Southeast China during this period. In order to predict the landuse in 2015 and 2030 in this region, the CA-Markov model was taken. The predicting result indicates: From 2000 to 2015, 2000 to 2030, the croplands would increase 2.53% and 2.85% respectively, which account that the croplands exploitation reached a peak, only a small area of land can be used in croplands. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing.