Abstract
A new reconstruction of changes in Taiwan’s land cover and estimated uncertainty between 1904 and 2015 is presented. The reconstruction is made by integrating geographical information from historical maps and SPOT satellite images, to obtain spatially explicit land cover maps with a resolution of 500 × 500 m and distinguishes six land cover classes: forests, grasslands, agricultural land, inland water, built-up land, and bare soil. The temporal resolution is unbalanced being derived from four historical maps describing the land cover between 1904 and 1994 and five mosaic satellite images describing the land cover between 1995 and 2015. The uncertainty of the historical maps is quantified to show the aggregation error whereas the uncertainty of the satellite images is quantified as classification error. Since 1904, Taiwan, as a developing country, has gone through a not unusual sequence of population growth and subsequent urbanization, a decoupling of the demand for agricultural land from population growth, and a transition from shrinking in forest area to forest expansion. This new land cover reconstruction is expected to contribute to future revisions of global land cover reconstructions as well as to studies of (gross) land cover changes, the carbon budget, regional climate, urban heat islands, and air and water pollution at the national and sub-national level.
Highlights
Land cover has been defined as “the attributes of the Earth’s land surface and immediate subsurface, including biota, soil, topography, surface and groundwater, and human structures”[1]
The portion of land allocated to infrastructure and bare soil remained at 2% but there were substantial changes in other land cover: e.q., agricultural land increased from 23% in 1904 to 34% in 1956 (Fig. 1)
The peak in agricultural land use itself was reached in the second period, changes in land cover mainly occurred in the first period
Summary
Land cover has been defined as “the attributes of the Earth’s land surface and immediate subsurface, including biota, soil, topography, surface and groundwater, and human (mainly built-up) structures”[1]. The fact that these maps were written in Japanese or Chinese, has likely hampered their inclusion in the global reconstruction efforts led by European and North American researchers[14,16,18] Following in their footsteps and other regional studies[7,29,30,31] the objective of this study is to use historical maps and satellite images as the basis for the first high resolution (500 × 500 m), century-long, wall-to-wall reconstruction of land cover changes in Taiwan. The outcome of this effort is expected to contribute to future revisions of global land cover reconstructions (see Table 1 in Fuchs et al.7) as well as to studies of (gross) land cover changes, the carbon budget, regional climate, urban heat islands, and air and water pollution at the national and sub-national scale
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