The spatial association rule is a basic method of spatial data mining,and it has been used in massive spatial data mining to find mutual interaction,spatial dependence,causal or symbiotic mode between spatial objects.Since land use/land cover change research has always been the pivotal frontier subject of global change research program,this study introduced spatial association rule technology into temporal and spatial characteristics research of land use change.Tonglu County was chosen as study area and its two typical land use change(the urban land transferred in;the arable land transferred out)from 2004 to 2009 was taken as the study cases.Combining the spatial calculation and spatial analysis functions of GIS,in this paper we first analyzed the general situation of Tonglu land-use area change and the process of urban land transferring in and arable land transferring out,by means of transition matrix of land use structure.Then classic spatial association rule algorithm(Apriori algorithm)was applied to dig out the spatial association rules between two typical land type changes and their surrounding adjacent land-type changes.The conclusions are as follows:(1)in Tonglu County,land use change showed significant nonagricultural trend,mainly due to its new urbanization process and idiomatical ecological construction.(2) Urban land development mainly depended on the transformation of arable land and rural settlements,both of which had high self-adjacent probability,demonstrating a concentrated and continuous expansion mode. Besides,urban land had obvious symbiosis relationship with construction land of transportation and water conservancy.(3)Arable land demonstrated a spatially continuous distribution feature when it comes to the same change type.Also it was likely to be driven or constrained by adjacent land type,especially forested lands and rural settlements.The application case demonstrates that spatial association rule mining gives quantitative analysis on the potential tendency of land types transformations and correlation regularity between land type changes under spatial adjacency circumstance,thus it can provide useful information for spatial and temporal characteristic research of land use change.