Abstract: Small- and medium-sized cities contribute equally and even more to the world urbanization than large and mega-cities, but the impacts of their urbanization on land use change have been less studied. Taking Cixi, a small coastal city of Zhejiang Province, as a case, this paper studied the land use change during its rapid urbanization from 1997 to 2007, based on the land use datasets derived from Landsat-TM/ETM images and CBERS image. A Markov model was also employed to predict the land use change of Cixi from 2010 to 2020. Our findings demonstrated that the urbanization of Cixi increased the urban industrial and residential lands, and decreased its cropland and natural landscapes (e.g., wetland). Such status would be continued, according to the prediction of Markov model. The rapid urbanization made the natural land use types in highly dynamic. The reclamation of coastal tidal flats, especially wetland, induced the increasing total area of Cixi to meet the continuous land demand of urbanization. Local government
’s policies, together with the encouraged accelerated industrialization and urbanization of towns and counties, as well as the market-oriented agricultural development, were the driving forces of the rapid land use change.

Key words: Wheat, Grain quality, Protein components, Genotype, Environment