Applications of Remote Sensing in Land Use/Land Cover Change Detection in Puer and Simao Counties, Yunnan Province

Digital change detection is the process that helps in determining the changes associated with land use and land cover properties with reference to geo-registered multi temporal remote sensing data. Puer and Simao, where land use has been greatly affected by recent government policies that aim to balance the need to encourage rural development with ecological stability. These policies include promoting livestock livelihoods, altering grazing practices, the removal of compulsory grain crop quotas and banning commercial logging. The counties remained important in Yunnan Province, Simao is of the six demonstration sites of sustainable forest management.The province harbors a large pool of biodiversity, mostly constrained to a few locations amongst which, Puer and Simao play a major role. For all those reasons, nonetheless, disproportionate Land use/cover change processes are taking place. This paper is an attempt to assess the changes in land use/land cover in this southern part of Yunnan over a nine year period. The study made use of Land Sat imageries of 1990 and 1999. The images were classified using Maximum Likelihood classification method in ENVI 4.3 and mapped using ArcGIS. The results indicated that severe land cover changes have occurred in croplands (+24.90%), forest or shrub land (-18.77%) and building (+16.72%) areas has been knowledgeable and unused area constituted the most extensive type of land use/land cover in the study period. This paper highlights the importance of digital change detection in apprehending the environmental situation in this southern part of Yunnan Province (China). (Journal of American Science 2009;5(4):157-166). (ISSN: 1545-1003).