In this paper, a GIS based analysis on the dynamic features of the landscapes in the arid regions in west China since recent 20 years is carried out by taking the NOAA data during the period of 1982~2000 as the basic information resource and under the support of ARC/INFO, the images are incised into some divisions, and then the divisions are classified based on their altitudes, and some indexes, such as the dominance indexes, diversity indexes, patch density indexes, margin density indexes and fractal dimen...