In this paper, we report an investigation of changes in land use and ecosystem change in Beijing between 1990 and 2006. We used the SPOT data sets of 2006 to estimate changes in the size of six land-cover/land use categories, and also used the Landscape Ecology Index to estimate changes in the ecosystem according to each land category and scale. Finally, we used the land use transition matrixes to quantitatively analyze the dynamic changing process of landscape pattern. We found that the construction land was increased by 1943 km² between 1990 and 2006. At the same time, the cultivated land decreased 1574 km². Four land use maps representing the years of 1990, 1995, 2000 and 2006 were used in the study. Result shows that fragmentation (measured by number of patches and mean patch size metrics) of the landscape increased from 1990 to 1995, and then decreased from 1995 to 2006. The analyses showed that the human activities strongly influence the landscape pattern and the dynamic changes.