Land-use/land-cover change (LUCC) is an important issue of research into global change. To identify the spatiotemporal change and the driving mechanism of land use at the regional scale is of great significance to environmental preservation and economic development in the whole locality. In order to analyze the spatiotemporal change of land cover in Fuxian Lake watershed for the last four decades, our paper extracted the information of land use and land cover in the area using the method of combining supervised classification with visual interpretation. The process of extraction referred to a total of 10 time series remotesensing images (namely the 1974, 1977, 1987, 1990, 1996, 2000, 2006, 2009, 2012, and 2014 phases) as the main data source, and drew on the achievement data from the China Geography Census as an ancillary source. Accordingly, we obtained the spatiotemporal characteristics of the land-cover type change in Fuxian Lake watershed for the last 40 years. Finally, based on the socioeconomic data in the locality, using principal component analysis and multiple regression analysis, this paper analyzed the driving forces of LUCC in the watershed to acquire the major driving force factors, and built up a corresponding multiple linear regression model. The same kind of model was established for the local cultivated land and its driving force factors.
The result shows that:
1) In terms of changing trends, along with the increasing human activities in the socioeconomic domain of the catchment, the last four decades has seen a mounting local number of gardens, building regions (districts), roads, structures, artificial piling and digging of land, as well as wastelands and bare surface. As a contrast, there has been a decreasing trend for cultivated land, woodland, grassland, and water for the same term.
2) The variation degree of land cover was higher during the period 1990-96 and 2000-06, and was the lowest in 1974-77.
3) During 1974-77, 1987-2000, 2006-14, and 1974-2014, there was a noticeable discrepancy between the converted areas of various land-use types, which was higher for woodland, grassland, and arable land, and was lower for water by comparison.
4) The cultivated area in Fuxian Lake watershed was positively correlated with such factors as overall population, natural population growth rate, the production value of the primary industry, the production value of the tertiary industry, industrial production value, GDP, fiscal expenditure, living expenditure per capita, and annual average temperature. It was negatively correlated with some other factors, including agricultural population, agricultural production value, rural income per capita, total retail sales of consumer goods, grain total output, the per unit area yield of grain, the amount of fertilizer used in agriculture, the amount of pesticide used in agriculture, and annual average precipitation.