Chinese Agriculture University

Abstract: Beijing, the capital of China, is under high pressures from land use change and inappropriate land management in its suburban counties. The purpose of the paper is to determine the direction and degree of the land use change of different counties in the suburb, which is incurred by typical land use phenomena: expansion of the building-up land by occupying the cultivated land, agriculture-structure-adjustment and reforestation in mountainous counties. The method is to compartmentalize the suburban counties into three types, then select six typical districts (e.g. every district is a solo county in the suburb) from the above types as samples to apply a centroid model to the main land use types in the inventory database in 1993 and 2004. We can find out the obvious displacements of corresponding centroids in the types of land use of the selected samples, explicitly showing that the configurations of land use have been changed in different parts of Beijing suburb. Furthermore, according to directions of the displacements, we can explore some typical patterns, which are driven by the abstraction of Beijing downtown, topography and land use policies as well as other factors. The result will benefit the rational planning and management of suburban land use in Beijing in the future