The purposes of the study were to detect and evaluate the historical land use and land cover changes on the Balan watersheds from three thematic mapper (TM) data, which were taken in 1985, 1993, and 1996. The supervised and unsupervised classification methods were adopted to classify five land cover categories: Paddy, upland, forest, residential, and water. The results indicated residential areas increased significantly during the past eleven years, Forest and paddy were converted to the urban areas. Future land cover patterns were forecasted using a Markov chain method, and the simulated land coiler change ratios presented.