Fractal characteristics of land use struture dynamic changes in urban fringe area-A case study of the extended south area of Guangzhou

Over the past two decades, with the rapid urbanization in Guangzhou, urban fringe area has been experiencing drastic land use changes. In this paper, taken the extended south area of Guangzhou as a typical urban fringe area example, land use structure and fractal model of the study area in 1990, 1995, 2000 and 2005 have been established from Landsat TM images by adopting GIS and RS technology. Dynamic degree, fractal dimension and stability index of the main land use types in each year are calculated. The results show that: from 1990 to 2005, land use of the extended south area of Guangzhou was experiencing significant changes under the strong forces of urbanization of core area in Guangzhou. According to the changes characteristics of land use, two phases of change can be interpreted: First, from 1990 to 1995, the structure of land use was changing drastically. In this period, the increase of construction land and decrease of farmland are the dominant processes, which greatly increased the fractal dimension and decreased the stability index. Second, from 1995 to 2005, changing speed of land structure was slowing down, farmland and forestry started to increase, along with the increase of fractal dimension and stability index became slighter, regional structure change of land use started to present a positive tendency.