College of Geo-Exploration Science and Technology, Jilin University, Changchun 130026, China

Land use and land cover change is one of the important topics in the global change study with the development of satellite-based remote sensing technologies. This study employed 3D landscape pattern metrics to analyze the dynamics of land cover types around Heaven Lake in Changbai Mountain area from 2010 to 2015. The results indicated that forest land occupied the most proportion and increased from 61.9% in 2010 to 66% in 2015 due to government forest protection policy. The mean elevation of vegetation, including agriculture, fo-rest, grass and shrub was much lower compared with other land cover types (water, wetland, imperious land and bare land) in both 2010 and 2015. The elevation of agriculture land increased from 1 700 m in 2010 to 1 890 m in 2015 a decreased land proportion. Considering the adjacent relationship between the local agriculture land and forest land, the transformation from agriculture land to forest land was obvious in the lower elevation area. The study showed that the selected 3D landscape pattern metrics had the ability and efficiency to describe the spatiotemporal variations of mountainous landscape, and significant correlation existed between land cover and local terrain.