Abstract: In order to research the frequent change of land use and the unreasonable structural relationship between human and land in the Loess Plateau region, this paper takes Zhidan County of Shaanxi Province as the research area, and by employing the GIS technology, carries out visual interpretation based on three-phase remote sensing Landset images in 2008, 2012 and 2016; besides, the spatial and temporal change characteristics of land use is studied by combining land transfer matrix, change map and information entropy. The results show that from 2008 to 2016, the land of the forest areas changed dramatically, with the forest land as the largest area in the stable mode of change, and the area of residential and traffic construction land expanded remarkably; the area of woodland, garden-land, grassland and waters decreased in varying degrees; and the cultivated land and woodland are still the main types of land use in Zhidan County. The transformation between cultivated land and woodland was very obvious. To sum up, land use in Zhidan County is developing stably. The research results are intended to provide a scientific basis for urban land use planning and sustainable development in the Loess Plateau in northern Shaanxi.