Due to inappropriate planning and management, accelerated urban growth and tremendous loss in land, especially cropland, have become a great challenge for sustainable urban development in China, especially in developed urban area in the coastal regions; therefore, there is an urgent need to effectively detect and monitor the land use changes and provide accurate and timely information for planning and management. In this study a method combining principal component analysis (PCA) of multisensor satellite images from SPOT (systeme pour l'observation de la terre or earth observation satellite)-5 multispectral (XS) and Landsat-7 enhanced thematic mapper (ETM) panchromatic (PAN) data, and supervised classification was used to detect and analyze the dynamics of land use changes in the city proper of Hangzhou. The overall accuracy of the land use change detection was 90.67% and Kappa index was 0.89. The results indicated that there was a considerable land use change (10.03% of the total area) in the study area from 2001 to 2003, with three major types of land use conversions: from cropland into built-up land, construction site, and water area (fish pond). Changes from orchard land into built-up land were also detected. The method described in this study is feasible and useful for detecting rapid land use change in the urban area.
