Monitoring Cropland Dynamics of the Yellow River Delta based on Multi-Temporal Landsat Imagery over 1986 to 2015

Quanlong Feng, Jianhua Gong, Jiantao Liu and Yi Li
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Quanlong Feng: State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science, Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences, No. 20 Datun Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100101, China
Jianhua Gong: State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science, Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences, No. 20 Datun Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100101, China
Jiantao Liu: State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science, Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences, No. 20 Datun Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100101, China
Yi Li: State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science, Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences, No. 20 Datun Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100101, China

Sustainability, 2015, vol. 7, issue 11, 1-25

Abstract: Natural deltas can provide human beings with flat and fertile land to be cultivated. It is important to monitor cropland dynamics to provide policy-relevant information for regional sustainable development. This paper utilized Landsat imagery to study the cropland dynamics of the Yellow River Delta during the last three decades. Multi-temporal Landsat data were used to account for the phenological variations of different plants. Several spectral and textural features were adopted to increase the between-class separability. The robust random forest classifier was used to generate the land cover maps of the Yellow River Delta for 1986, 1995, 2005 and 2015. Experimental results indicated that the proposed methodology showed good performance with an average classification accuracy of 89.44%. The spatial-temporal analysis indicated that the cropland area increased from 467.6 km 2 in 1986 to 718.5 km 2 in 2015 with an average growth rate of 8.65 km 2 /year. The newly created croplands were mainly due to the reclamation of grassland and bare soil while the losses of croplands were due to abandoned cultivation and urban sprawl. The results demonstrate that a sustainable perspective should be adopted by the decision makers in order to simultaneously maintain food security, industrial development and ecosystem safety.

Keywords: cropland; the Yellow River Delta; multi-temporal; random forest; landsat (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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