Land Cover Changes of the Qilian Mountain National Park in Northwest China Based on Phenological Features and Sample Migration from 1990 to 2020

Abstract

The spatial and temporal variation analysis of land cover classification is important for studying the distribution and transformation of regional land cover changes. The Qilian Mountain National Park (QMNP), an important ecological barrier in northwestern China, has lacked land cover products for long time series. The Landsat images available on the Google Earth Engine (GEE) make it possible to analyze the land cover changes over the past three decades. The purpose of this study was to generate a long time series of datasets of land cover classification based on the method of sample migration in the QMNP in Northwest China. The Landsat 5, 7, and 8 images and field sample data were combined with multiple image features and the random forest algorithm to complete the land cover classification of the QMNP from 1990 to 2020. The results indicate that (1) the method of Jeffries–Matusita (J-M) distance can reduce image feature redundancy and show that elevation and phenological features have good differentiability among land cover types that were easy to mix with feature classes; (2) the spatial distribution of land cover every 10 years between 1990 and 2020 was consistent in the QMNP, and there were obvious differences in land cover from the east to the west part of the QMNP, with a large area of vegetation distribution in Sunan county in the central part and Tianzhu county in the east part of the QMNP; (3) over the past 30 years, forests and grasslands decreased by 62.2 km2 and 794.7 km2, respectively, while shrubs increased by 442.9 km2 in the QMNP. The conversion of bare land to grassland and the interconversion between different vegetation types were the main patterns of land cover changes, and the land cover changes were mainly concentrated in pastoral areas, meaning that human activity was the main factor of land cover changes; and (4) when the samples of 2020 were migrated to 2010, 2000, and 1990, the overall classification accuracies were 89.7%, 88.0%, 86.0%, and 83.9%, respectively. The results show that the vegetation conservation process in the QMNP was closely related to human activities.