Land Use/Cover Changes in the rural-urban interaction of XiŽan Region, West China, using Lansat TM/ETM data

Landsat ETM/TM data and an artificial neural network (ANN) were applied to analyse the expanding of the city of XiŽan and land use/cover changing of its surrounding area between 2000 and 2003. Supervised classification and normalized difference barren index (NDBI) were used respectively to retrieve its urban boundary. Results showed that the urban area had increased by the rate of 12.3% per year, with area expansion from 253.37 km2 in 2000 to 358.60 km2 in 2003. Large areas of farmland in the north and southwest were converted into urban construction land. The land use/cover changes of XiŽan were mainly caused by: fast development of urban economic, population immigration from countryside, great development of infrastructure such as transportation, and huge demands of urban market. In addition, affected by the government policy of "returning farmland to woodland ", some farmland was converted to economic woodland, such as Chinese gooseberry garden and vineyard etc.