Based on the review of related research on construction land expansion at home and abroad,this paper takes Dalian urban area as the study area to analyze the construction land development during the past20 years.Five TM/ETM images were used to extract the boundary of construction land from 1990-2010 with a five years interval.ENVI and GIS were employed to obtain the boundary from remote sensing image data.Then the characteristics of construction land expansion are identified by using several methods,including expansion speed,expansion contribution rate,expansion elasticity,fractal model and spatial barycenter transfer model.Based on the five models the spatial and temporal features of Dalian urban area were analyzed and three development stages were divided from 1990 to 2010.The result showed that,during the past 20 years,the area of construction land is expanded almost 1.34 times compared to 1990 and the main development direction is northeast,which is more obvious between 1990 and 1995.Compared to the fast expanding area of construction land,the expanding speed is a decreasing trend which contain a appreciably rally after 2005.At last,we analyzed three main driving factors contain population,economic development and policy.Population is a major driving factor of construction land expansion.The establishment and development of the development zones play a significant traction and driving role in the construction land expansion of Dalian urban area.