The cultivated land and the ecological land are important factors to maintain the ecological security and the sustainable development. Identifying their dynamic evolution and the transformation relationship will provide a decision-making basis for the ecological environment protection. With Jilin, Liaoning and Heilongjiang provinces in Northeast China as the empirical areas, this paper quantifies the change matrix between the cultivated land and the other types of land based on the Landsat remote sensing images of 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2015 as the data sources. The results show that:in northeast China, the conversion of the ecological land into the cultivated land is 3.11 times of that of the cultivated land into the ecological land, where the forest land and the grassland are more active than the waters among the ecological land; the change of the cultivated land area reduces the ecological land step by step in Heilongjiang Province and Jilin Province, so it is desirable to emphasize the rational development of the unused land; the construction land has expanded rapidly through occupying the cultivated land, therefore the flow of the cultivated land to the ecological land is hampered; The flow pattern of ecological land to cultivated land and cultivated land to construction land made land resources face great pressure in Northeast China; Reducing grassland reclamation and controlling the disordered expansion of construction land were the vital methods to protect land resources; Moreover, preventing opening up wasteland and deforestation were also important to facilitate better coordinated development between economy and environment.

land use  /  cultivated land  /  ecological land  /  resource protection