Abstract: Land use and cover change (LUCC) models are the important tools in researching regional landscape dynamics and its driving mechanisms. With the application of CLUE-S (Conversion of Land Use and Its Effects at Small Regional Extent) model and under the support of Landsat remotely sensed data, this paper simulated the land use changes in Nanjing metropolitan region from 1998 to 2006. The results indicated that the land use changes were mostly affected by topography, and the distribution of urban land and agricultural land were significantly related with GDP per capita. Moreover, the urbanrural trunk roads made a much greater contribution to land use changes than provincial roads. Generally, highaltitude region tended to benefit the odds-ratio of woodland, while flat and low terrain benefited all the odds ratios of farmland and settlement. The accuracy of the simulation approached to 85.7% in 2003 and 84.1% in 2006 at 300 m spatial resolution, while as the parameters were recalculated according to the partial conditions and given divisionally, the accuracy of the model improved remarkably to 89.7% in 2003 and 88.3% in 2006. The results suggested that CLUE-S had a strong capability of predicting the changes of land use types, and even, the spatial structure of landscape, being available in urban planning and in researching the driving mechanisms of land use change.

Key words: Hydrophyte, Iron plaque, Nutritional elements, Heavy metal elements