Entropies of the Chinese Land Use/Cover Change from 1990 to 2010 at a County Level

Land Use/Cover Change (LUCC) has gradually became an important direction in the research of global changes. LUCC is a complex system, and entropy is a measure of the degree of disorder of a system. According to land use information entropy, this paper analyzes changes in land use from the perspective of the system. Research on the entropy of LUCC structures has a certain “guiding role” for the optimization and adjustment of regional land use structure. Based on the five periods of LUCC data from the year of 1990 to 2010, this paper focuses on analyzing three types of LUCC entropies among counties in China—namely, Shannon, Renyi, and Tsallis entropies. The findings suggest that: (1) Shannon entropy can reflect the volatility of the LUCC, that Renyi and Tsallis entropies also have this function when their parameter has a positive value, and that Renyi and Tsallis entropies can reflect the extreme case of the LUCC when their parameter has a negative value.; (2) The entropy of China’s LUCC is uneven in time and space distributions, and that there is a large trend during 1990–2010, the central region generally has high entropy in space.