Identification of key changed land use type in LUCC: A case study of Guishui river basin

In this paper, the transfer matrix of land use and cover change (LUCC) is studied as a network, in which land use types are nodes and area conversions between different land use types are links and the node betweenness method of complex network is applied to identify the key changed land use types. Compared with traditional method, complex network takes into account not only quantitative relation, but also transfer direction and system concept, namely the status and role of each land type in the transfer matrix network. Also, this method has been validated based on six Landsat images from 1978 to 2009 of Guishui river basin located in northwest Beijing. The results showed that grassland and farmland are all the key changed land use types from 1978 to 1993, and farmland and woodland were the key changed land use types during the periods 1993 to 2004 and 2004 to 2009, respectively.