A 2010 update of National Land Use/Cover Database of China at 1:100000 scale using medium spatial resolution satellite images

Abstract

A project to map national land use/cover in China was initialized in the latter half of the 1990s. A national land use/cover database of China (NLUD-C, hereafter) at 1:100000 scale that contains Chinese land use/cover data of five periods (1980s, 1995, 2000, 2005 and 2008) was developed during the project. To elucidate long-period sequence land use/cover data for land use/cover change driving factor analysis and ecological environment change research, this database was updated in 2010. Because the NLUD-C focuses more on the thematic and location precisions of land use/cover change dynamics, remote sensing images with approximately 30m spatial resolution, visual interpretation, field survey and large amounts of auxiliary information were applied during the update process. The results reveal that the change of land use/cover is more complex with 35 change forms among the first-level types and 480 change forms among second-level types between 2008 and 2010. The amount of land use/cover change patches reaches 108,006, and the dynamic area is 40,083.68km2. In addition, the NLUD-C accuracy for the selected polygons is more than 96.67%, and the accuracy of the selected first-level types is more than 95.41%.