Dongchuan is a typical resource-based city in the China southwest mountain area. In recent years,the combination of the natural factors such as climate change and the human factors as rapid urbanization brought huge pressure to the land pattern optimization of Dongchuan. The analysis of the land pattern change from 1990 to 2010 in Dongchuan could be a basic part of the land pattern optimization. In this study, the land pattern and process of Dongchuan during 1990 to 2010 were analyzed by using ArcGIS and Fragstats 3.3, which are based on the three phase data of land use in 1990, 2000 and 2010. The results showed that forest, grassland and farmland are the main landscape types in the research areas,while the construction land,open water and unoccupied land accounted for only about 5.5%. In the two study period, the overall land pattern had not changed significantly, but the conversion rate of different land use types showed an increasing trend, farmland and forest reduced after the first increase, the grassland was firstly increased and then decreased, construction land, open water and unoccupied land were sustained growth,the changes of land use made the landscape tend to diversity,broken,the fragmentation and diversity of the landscape increased,while the dominance of the landscape decreased. The change of climate, the frequency of mountain disasters and the increasing intensity of human activities are the main trust to influence the land pattern and the sustainable development of Dongchuan. While the policies of state and local government are the external guiding force to change the land pattern.