Abstract: Land use and cover changes play an important role in the study of global environmental change and sustainable development. This paper summarizes the related research progresses in two fields, land use and cover information recognition based on remote sensing images and their spatial and temporal changes. The study found that land use and cover studies have already formed a particular research paradigm under the support of RS and GIS technique. There is an important research trend of combination of multi analysis methods, multi data sources and multiple periods. Current studies have made significant progress in the recognition of ecological-production-living space. However, much attention has been paid on the studies in cities especially big cities, while the studies in small and medium-sized cities and towns do not obtain enough attention. The studies in spatiotemporal changes of land use and cover focus on urban and rural units. The causes, consequences, characteristics, processes, patterns and measuring methods of urban expansion and urban sprawl are the main aspects of urban land use and cover studies. Cultivated land protection and rural residential land changes are the focuses of rural land use and cover studies. There is an undesirable tendency that urban land use and cover received more attentions than rural ones. Future studies should pay more attention to improving problem-orientated research and application of research findings, so as to build an innovative research framework suitable for China. Integrated studies of multidisciplinary and multi-field should be encouraged to create native and original achievements.

Key words: geographic information system, land use and land cover, remote sensing, review, spatial information identification of ecological-production-living, urban expansion