Abstract: Urban landscape is not only a typical characteristic of urban expansion , but also an importantindicator to evaluate the level of urbanization. Measuring landscape characteristic and analyzing its spa-tio-temporal evolution pattem is helpful to reveal the trend of urban expansion and provide a support forrational urban planning. Taking Chenggong district of Kunming of Yunnan province of China as the casestudy, this issue measured the characteristics of urban landscape expansion with Multi-order AdjacencIndex ( MAl) and analyzed its geographic cluster pattern using spatial autocorrelation analysis methodfrom 2005 to 2020 (every 5 years is a calculation period, and there are three periods in total). Firstly.we measured the characteristic of urban landscape according to the MAl values, and then , based on theMAl value , the spatial autocorrelation analysis method was adopted to detect the geographic cluster patterns and the urbanization trend. The results showed that: l) Sprawl type and edge type were the maintypes of urban landscape expansion in the study area, while the other types were more average and haveobvious gap compared with the above two types; 2) In the early stage of urban development ( the first 10years) , the sprawl type dominated , and then the trend was obviously declining in the later stage; 3 )The high-high cluster areas of MAl showed the trend of urban expansion from the center to the surround-ing areas, and the pace of urbanization was developing towards the direction of “ compact". These re-sults indicated that the combination of MAl and spatial autocorrelation is an effective way to measure anddetect the characteristics of urban landscape expansion and its spatio-temporal evolution process.

Key words: urban landscape expansion, landscape pattem, spatial autocorrelation, multi-order adjacency index: drive analysis