National ecological environmental quality assessment based on multi-sources remote sensing data

Abstract

Since the reform and opening-up, the society and economy of China has rapidly developing, and the living standard of person has been greatly improved. However, along with the rapid economic development, China is facing a series of environmental problems such as ecological destruction, environmental pollution and land degradation etc.. It is essential to conduct an in-depth research on the existing environmental problems in China. According to the carrying capacity assessment of land and resources, using multi-source remote sensing data such as MODIS data, nighttime light data as well as the socio-economic statistics and meteorological data from 2002 to 2013, the evaluation model of the national ecological environmental quality is established based on the combination of multi-criteria decision-making algorithms and principal component analysis. The assessment model of ecological environmental quality is verified by comparing the evaluation results of two different models: environmental performance index, ecological carrying capacity and eco-environmental quality index. All of results have shown a downward trend. Lastly, the better relationship between the ecological environmental quality and the ecological carrying capacity is established. The R-squared reaches 0.5023 and the correlation coefficient reaches 0.7087, which reveals the reliability and scientificity of the ecological environmental quality assessment model of China constructed in this study. The results show that the quality of ecological environment in China shows a downward trend in general. The area of the eco-environmental quality index between 0.6-0.8 performs a downward trend temporally, and then it decreased to the value between 0.4-0.6. The boundary between 0.4-0.6 and 0.6-0.8 spread southward.