in the city and town center, and the other is industrial land in therural area, which is more sporadic compared with the former. Inorder to measure and better understand land use change character-istics, especially the expansion and fragmentation of land use whichhas important implications for land resources and environmentalprotection, we apply some landscape ecology indices to quantifythe land use change, which are explained as follows:•Percentage of landscape (PLAND): the percentage of land area ofland-use type i, Ai, in total land area A. PLAND = Ai/A•Number of patches (NP): number of patches of land use i. Thelarger the NP is, the more fragmented the landscape is.•Mean patch size (MPS): Overall area of patches of land use idivided by number of patches of land use i. MPS = Ai/ni. Thesmaller the MPS is, the more fragmented the landscape is.•Patch density (PD): total number of patches of land-use i dividedby the total landscape area A. PD = ni/A. PD is also used to measurethe fragmentation level of land use. The larger the PD is, the morefragmented the landscape is.•Landscape shape index (LSI) is used to measure how regularthe landscape shape is. LSI = (0.25/√S) × L, where L is the totallength of edge (or perimeter) of land use i, S is the area of class i.The closer to 1, the more regular the shape.•Landscape fragmentation degree (LFD): number of patches ofland use i divided by overall area of patches of land use Ai,.LFD = (ni− 1)/AiThe bigger LFD is, the more fragmented the land-scape is.Table 3 and Fig. 6 present the characteristics of land use changeof non-agricultural land of Jiangyin and Shunde during the periodof 2001–2010. We have the following findings: