Monitoring of land use/land cover change of Ruoergai Nature Reserve in Sichuan province, China

Abstract

© 2015 SPIE. Ruoergai nature reserve is located in Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province. In the last five years, the wetland and grassland have degraded very seriously for deforestation and over grazing. In our paper, we utilized the Landsat 5 TM images in 2007, 2009, and 2011, to obtain the land use/land cover change of Ruoergai reserve based on GIS. Firstly, the TM images were acquired, enhanced, mosaicked, and subset to derive the images of Ruoergai nature reserve. Secondly, the unsupervised classification approaches were used to obtain the land use/land cover change of the reserve. Finally, the land use/land cover change between 2007 and 2011was discussed and analyzed. Our results showed that the area of water body and swamp in the reserve had shrank by 52.346%, the area of grass land had decreased by 12.754%, the area of forest land in Ruoergai had reduced by 3.224%, while the area of bare land, cultivated land and construction land had increased by 6.647% in the last five years.