Study on land use/land cover change in Jintai and Weibing districts of Baoji city in Western China based on remote sensing technology and Markov method

The research on land use / land cover change (LUCC) can provide an important means to understand the relationship between ecological environmental change and human being's activity. The study area, in this paper, Jintai District and Weibin District, is the suburban area of Baoji City, which is located at the frontier of Western Development in China. To explore the typical pattern of land cover change in western China, the LUCC of the study area from 1988 to 2004 is analyzed, using remote sensing technology. Based on these, Markov model is applied to predict the tendency of the LUCC of this area in the next 16 years, and the results indicate that human being's activity, especially in the western cities, will have an increasingly great influence on the regional ecological environment in the current pattern of land use. Faced with the contradiction between land and people and severe ecological environment, establishing land use regulation indices and spatial optimal designs favorable to ecological environment by setting up general land use planning scientifically is important to satisfy reasonable demand of land with economic development and accelerated urbanization and improve ecological environment in western cities in China.