Agriculture and pasture interlaced zone (APIZ) is ecological extremely sensitive and vulnerable to global change.Affected by human activities and climate change, landscape patterns in APIZ,have changed tremendously.In this paper,we applied remote sensing images to quantify the landscape changes and their driving forces in the Huangqihai Lake Basin using ENVI 4.7,ArcGIS 9.3 and FRAGSTATS 3.3.The results showed that areas of grassland and wetland landscape types shrank rapidly, while cropland and built-up landscape types increased during 1976-2010.At the landscape level,values of patch density, landscape shape index and Shannon's diversity index increased, but the contagion index decreased.These changes implied that landscape fragmentation and landscape diversity increased and the relative dominance of grassland decreased in the study area.Human activity was an important driving force of the landscape changes.With population growth and increasing grain production,built-up and cropland landscape types expanded largely.Economic growth caused abundant water consumption and the construction of water conservancy projects changed the hydrological cycle, resulting in the loss of wetland.