Changes in land cover and land use are always closely related to socio-economic activities, and the intensity of changes is proportional to demographic trends and spatial development. The main goals of this thesis are to determine the dominant socio-economic processes in Zadar County, to determine the type and extent of changes in land cover and land use, and to reveal the relationship between them. In the last few decades, Zadar County has experienced numerous and comprehensive changes in its socio-economic structure and using the desk method of statistical data analysis (descriptive statistics and calculation of indicators), it was discovered that these are primarily manifested in strong depopulation, deruralization and deagrarization as well as increasingly littoralization, which is particularly favored by the development of tourism. All these processes lead to major changes in the landscape, and the identification of these changes was carried out using GIS analysis and visualization methods. The research showed that in the observed period 1990 – 2018, changes observed on more than a fifth of the land area of Zadar County, and the dominant changes are related to the expansion of natural vegetation and human-influenced areas on the one hand, and the reduction of total agricultural areas on the other. The results show that the process of spreading natural vegetation takes place primarily in the coastal hinterland and island areas of the county, where the processes of depopulation, deruralization and deagrarization are most pronounced. The coastal area, on the other hand, experienced strong demographic growth and recorded positive trends in the expansion of arable land, and it also has the strongest increase in the share of human-influenced land due to increasing construction of apartments. In general, the differences in development between the coastal, insular and coastal hinterland parts of the county are becoming more and more significant, and it can be concluded that in the absence of quick measures, such differences will grow stronger and lead to even stronger and more negative changes in the land cover and land use in the future.