Analysis of land use change and its driving forces in Nanjing metropolitan area

Abstract

As the earliest inter-provincial metropolitan area started to be built in China, the Nanjing metropolitan area has become an important issue worthy of study in this region after 20 years of development. In order to quantify the characteristics of land use change and its driving factors, ArcGIS was used to calculate the land use transfer matrix and analyze the land use change in Nanjing metropolitan area for two time periods from 2000 to 2010 and 2010 to 2020, and the driving factors of land use change in the study area were explored by the method of principal component analysis. The results show that the Nanjing metropolitan area is dominated by arable land, forest land and water bodies, which account for more than 80% of the total area; the area of arable land decreases significantly and the area of construction land continues to increase during the study period, and the area of arable land transformed into construction land is the most numerous among the land use change types. The increase in population, socio-economic development and changes in climatic factors are the main driving factors for land use type conversion in the Nanjing metropolitan area. This study provides a theoretical basis for the sustainable and high-quality development of land resources and the coordinated development of human-land relations in the Nanjing metropolitan area.