Abstract: To understand the landscape change characteristics and its influencing factors in urban development process of tropical coastal city, based on the SPOT image data, with the support of RS, GIS software and landscape ecology method, the dynamic changes of land use and landscape pattern in Sanya from 2002 to 2012 were analyzed. The results showed that: (1) during the past 10 years, the main landscapes were farmland and broad leaved forest, but the construction land increased significantly, all of the landscape types had mutual transfer, such as paddy field decreased by 25.75% , reservoir or pond decreased by 6.21% ; brushwood, construction land and dry land increased by about 143.16%, 86.89% and 10.20%, respectively; (2) after landscape pattern index and transfer matrix analysis, it was concluded that the number of landscape patch was decreasing, and the landscape fragmentation was reduced, mainly due to the strengthened interference of human activities, and the speed up of urbanization process, the original fragmented distribution of residential land and building land became poly integration, which led to the decrease of landscape fragmentation degree in this area.