Abstract
Previous field research on the Horqin Sandy Land (China), which has suffered from severe desertification during recent decades, revealed how land use on a sand-dune topography affects both land degradation and restoration. This study aimed to depict the spatial distribution of local land use in order to shed more light on previous field findings regarding policies on a broader scale. We performed the following analyses with Panchromatic Remote-sensing Instrument for Stereo Mapping (PRISM) and Advanced Visible and Near Infrared Radiometer type 2 (AVNIR-2) images of Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS): (1) object-based classification to discriminate preliminary classification of land-use types that were approximately differentiated by ordinary pixel-based analysis with spectral information; (2) digital photogrammetry to generate a digital surface model (DSM) with adequately high accuracy to represent undulating sand-dune topography; (3) geographic information system (GIS) analysis to classify major topographic types with the digital surface model (DSM); and (4) overlay of the two classification results to depict the local land-use types. The overall accuracies of the object-based and GIS-based classifications were high, at 93% (kappa statistic: 0.84) and 89% (kappa statistic: 0.81), respectively. The resultant local land-use map represents areas covered in previous field studies, showing where and how land degradation and restoration are likely to occur. This research can contribute to future environmental surveys, models, and policies in the study area.
Highlights
Desertification and land degradation are globally recognized environmental problems and strongly localized phenomena
If multi-temporal images are available at high temporal resolution, and crop phenology or land surfaces right before and after harvest can be adequately detected and added as information for classification, the relatively low accuracies found in each classification result could be improved, non-separability between cropland and non-cropland, or even different types of cropland
This paper demonstrates that a digital surface model (DSM) produced from Panchromatic Remote-sensing Instrument for Stereo Mapping (PRISM) images is accurate enough to capture undulating sand-dune topography in a semi-arid region of northeast China
Summary
Desertification and land degradation are globally recognized environmental problems and strongly localized phenomena. Land cover is defined by the physical attributes of the earth’s surface, whereas land use is defined as the purposes for which humans exploit the land cover [4]. These definitions suggest that land cover can be directly observed by remote sensing, while land use requires socioeconomic interpretation. It is crucial to consider a target area’s unique circumstances. It is often the case, that little is known about detailed land-use distribution in various local contexts [7]
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