The terrestrial transects of IGBP emphasize on explaining issues concerning global change through gradient methods, and land use is one of the gradient factors. The socio economic development extent, largely influencing decade scale land use change, is mainly taken into account to determine the research sphere of transect of the Yangtse River. Accordingly, considering the boundary of district, it covers an area of 1.12 million km 2 or so, contains 310 counties/cities, under jurisdiction of 11 provinces (autonomous regions, municipalities) of Shanghai, Jiangsu, Anhui, Jiangxi, Hubei, Hunan, Chongqing, Sichuan, Yunnan, Qinghai and Tibet. Supported by geographic information system, the land use pattern after a decade or more rapid socio economic development in transect of the Yangtse River is obtained through analyzing and dealing with the land use data of the mid 1990s. Then, canonical correlation analysis is applied to identify the influential factors of land use pattern in transect of the Yangtse River. Through operations of the statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) and specific analysis of the results, the contribution of each influential factor to land use pattern can be identified quantitatively. At the same time, tests are carried out through the canonical correlation coefficient and redundancy analysis. It is concluded that the land use pattern in transect of the Yangtse River is affected by physical factors and socio economic factors synthetically. Through foregoing analysis, abstracted influential factors involve height above sea level, temperature, terrain, economic density (i.e. GDP value per km 2), and village labors density. The distribution of pasture shows positive correlation with height above sea level and negative correlation with the warmest month average temperature, and it implies that pasture is usually distributed in the region with high sea level and low temperature. The positive correlation between economic density and the distribution of land for urban and rural construction shows that rapid socio economic development has been resulting in continuing sprawl of land for urban and rural development. The two factors of the coldest month average temperature and slope have positive correlation with the distribution of woodland. Furthermore, positive correlation between village labors density and the distribution of farmland implies the more village labors in a region, the more farmland proportion.