[Objective] This study was to provide basis for the scientific management of land use in Haihe River Basin （HRB） through the quantitative exploration of the land use conversion, changes of intensity and spatial distribution in this region. [Method] With the support of remote sensing technology and geographic information technology, the land use maps of the study area in 40 years （1970-2010） were in- terpreted and plotted. Four kinds of tupu, namely, land use change tupu, process tupu, arising tupu and evolution mode tupu were built through the spatial overlay of the land use maps to analyze the change rules of land use patterns. [Result] The conversion of arable land to construction land was the main characteristics of land use changes in HRB for the 40 years; the area of non-stable region accounted for 35% of the total, indicating that the land use changed remarkably, thus, it was nec- essary to strengthen the scientific land management in HRB; the new conversions to all land use patterns were all the lowest in 1980-1990, indicating that land use changed slowly during this period. [Conclusion] The results indicate that, compared with conventional transfer matrix method, geo-information tupu has obvious advantage in analyzing land use changes that it can demonstrate the spatial distribution of interest region, display the multi-dimensional spatial information.
