The Qinghai–Tibet Plateau has seen decades of changes in land use/cover as a result of urbanization and regional planning policy. Research on the efficiency of social development aids in the pursuit of social and environmental sustainability. Based on CLUD and socioeconomic statistical data, this study systematically analyses the spatiotemporal evolution characteristics of urban land use in the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau and evaluates its social development efficiency from three perspectives—the holistic, the municipal, and urban hierarchy—by using indicators such as the Moran index, land use efficiency, and urban expansion speed and proportion. Results show that the urbanization rate climbed from 21.26% to 54.95%, and the area of urban lands increased from 201.93 km2 to 796.59 km2 from 1990 to 2020, with urban lands expanding from the Lanzhou–Xining City Area to the central and south of the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau. The holistic urban land use efficiency grew from 1.14 to 1.53, while the UPD decreased slightly from 1.44 to 1.31, and the UED increased steadily from 1.40 to 12.97 per decade. Moreover, we should pay attention to the rational allocation of land in human, social and ecosystem terms to comprehensively improve the quality of urbanization across the plateau.

The Zoige Alpine Wetland of eastern Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau is one of the most important wetlands in the world, which suffered stronger human regulations of decades' drainage and recent restoration. It is so fragile that great efforts should be made to strengthen wetland protection. Based on wetland type classification for 7 periods by the object-oriented classification method, we quantitatively discussed dynamically changes of wetland cover types and their driving forces.Conclusions show that alpine meadows accounts for 44.59% of the whole area of the county, and the transition between alpine meadows and swamp meadows mostly occurs in the process of wetland landscape changes. Changes of wetland cover types have taken place in Zoige County from 1990 to 2018 in which wetland loss was mainly caused by the decrease of marsh areas during 1995-2005. Particularly, shift from alpine meadows to swamp meadows led to wetland slightly expansion in two periods, that is, 1990-1995 and 2005-2018. There is a significant negative correlation between marsh area and average temperature in growing season, average wind speed and rural population, and a significant negative correlation between water area and maximum wind speed. The increase of air temperature and wind speed lead to an enhancement of surface evapotranspiration and a decrease of water retention capacity. Whereas, positive feedback of ecosystem lead to an increase in air temperature and a decrease of marsh area. Both climatic changes and human activities have caused changes in wetland cover type, especially temperature in growing season, wind speed, agricultural development, and animal husbandry.