A 2010 update of National Land Use/Cover Database of China at 1:100000 scale using medium spatial resolution satellite images

A project to map national land use/cover in China was initialized in the latter half of the 1990s. A national land use/cover database of China (NLUD-C, hereafter) at 1:100000 scale that contains Chinese land use/cover data of five periods (1980s, 1995, 2000, 2005 and 2008) was developed during the project. To elucidate long-period sequence land use/cover data for land use/cover change driving factor analysis and ecological environment change research, this database was updated in 2010. Because the NLUD-C focuses more on the thematic and location precisions of land use/cover change dynamics, remote sensing images with approximately 30 m spatial resolution, visual interpretation, field survey and large amounts of auxiliary information were applied during the update process. The results reveal that the change of land use/cover is more complex with 35 change forms among the first-level types and 480 change forms among second-level types between 2008 and 2010. The amount of land use/cover change patches reaches 108,006, and the dynamic area is 40,083.68 km2. In addition, the NLUD-C accuracy for the selected polygons is more than 96.67%, and the accuracy of the selected first-level types is more than 95.41%.