Remote sensing research issues of the National Land Use Change Program of China

In 1999, the Ministry of Land and Resources (MLR) of China launched the National Land Use Change Program especially to monitor the scale and distribution of urban expansion and the decrease in cultivated land through remote sensing technology. This Program has been carried out annually and continuously for seven years since then and played an important role in the policy-making of MLR about land management and planning. This paper gives an overview about this Program and discusses several research issues. First, the remote sensing data sources and other ancillary data used in this Program are presented. The approaches for image preprocessing, i.e. radiometric normalization, image geometric rectification and image fusion are then introduced with an emphasis on the algorithm development for image registration. Second, land use change detection technique is the most critical and complex aspect of the Program. The methodologies for change detection using either bi-temporal image pair or one existing land use map and one remotely sensed image are detailed. Third, since the data of land use changes derived from remote sensing will be operationally used for local and central government, field validation and accuracy assessment are crucial to ensure the reliability of change detection results. The strategy of field work and the resulting accuracy evaluations is presented. The land use and change information derived from remotely sensed data has wide applications for land management, including land use database updating, verification of land use planning and monitoring of national high-tech parks. Last, suggestions on how to make full use of the images and change detection result, to improve the consistency of land use classification and to develop change detection algorithms for diverse and complex remote sensing data are given.