This PDF file contains the front matter associated with SPIE Proceedings Volume 7471, including the Title Page, Copyright information, Table of Contents, and Conference Committee listing.

In this paper, Moderate Resolution Image Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data with high spectral and temporal resolutions were used as input parameters for Chinese regional scale land cover classification. Firstly, Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI), Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) and Normalized Difference Soil Index (NDSI) were calculated as input spectral features relies on an annual time series of twelve MODIS 8-day composite reflectance images (MOD09) acquired during the year of 2007. The monthly EVI was produced by the maximum value composite; the three indices were added in the image to form a 10-spectral-bands image. In order to reduce the input feature space dimension, we resort to the mean Jeffries-Matusita distance as a statistical separability criterion to select the best spectral feature combination according to their ability of separating the land cover classes. Once we achieved, the monthly best combination spectral bands were dealt with Principal Component Analysis (PCA) method and their first three principal components were used as input parameters for decision tree classification. The result showed that the best combination of spectral bands added temporal information as input parameters can reach a certain high classification accuracy (81.16%) at moderate spatial scales without other accessorial data.

China has witnessed fast urban growth in recent decades. In this study, remote sensing data from both Landsat-5 TM and Landsat-7 ETM+ were utilized to assess the spatial-temporal characteristics of the urban area in Shenyang in northeast China. To quantitatively determine urban land use extents and development densities, land use/cover were mapped for 8 periods from 1986 to 2007 around the urban and suburban area in Shenyang. The urban-rural boundaries and urban development densities were defined by selecting certain imperviousness threshold values and Landsat thermal bands were used to investigate the thermal patterns of urban surface. Analysis results suggest that urban surface thermal characteristics and patterns can be identified qualitatively based on the urban land use and development density data. Results show that the urban area of Shenyang has an obvious daytime heating effect (heat-source). These thermal effects are strongly correlated with urban development densities i.e. higher percentage imperviousness is usually associated with higher surface temperature. Using vegetation canopy coverage information, the spatial and temporal distributions of urban impervious surface and associated thermal characteristics were demonstrated to be very useful source in quantifying urban land use, development intensity, and urban thermal patterns.

Urbanization is found to be closely associated with land use/land cover change which has an important influence in our environment and ecosystems, such as urban heat island effect, biodiversity loss, soil erosion, and pollutions. Studies on accurately simulating urban expansion have been inspired by increasing concerns of the sustainability of urban development. This paper reports our research aiming to simulate the expansion of Hangzhou city using SLEUTH (slope, landuse, exclusion, urban extent, transportation and hillshade) urban growth model. In this research, we investigates the urban spatial growth patterns based on Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM)/Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) images and creates four land cover change scenarios in 2020 with different socio-economic conditions. The results show that the SLEUTH model is less effective for depicting wave-like urban growth. From the four projected scenarios, urban area in this city will increase linearly and the shape of the city continues to be multi-nuclei in 2020. The hotspot area featured by intensive urban growth would, however, shift from urban center to sub-centers.

As a major commodity grain base in the Chengdu Plain, the city of Chengdu has played a significant role in the grain security of the Sichuan Province and the stability of national economy. However, with the urbanization process, the cultivated land quantity reduces and quality drops, which further affect the security of the grain production. In this study, we integrate remote sensing and geographic information systems to detect land-use change and reveal the increase in urban built-up land between 1992 and 2002. We compute the indicators of barycenters transformation and landscape index to illustrate the spatial expansion of the built-up land in Chengdu. The result shows that the built-up land increased from 31280 hm² to 41196 hm². The net gain of the built-up land was 9916 hm² between 1992 and 2002. The quality of the cultivated land was in the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth grades, occupying 0.02%, 87.70%, 5.53%, and 6.75%, respectively. The barycenter of the built-up land moved 0.87 km westward and 2.54 km northward, respectively. With the built-up land patches reducing from 6230 to 5510, their fractal dimensions and broken degree decreased from 1.069 to 1.032 during the ten years, and the average patch area increased from 5.02 hm² to7.48 hm². Finally, we propose a built-up land spatial expansion model based on the development stage and construction levels in Chengdu.

According to the assignment of land use survey in Lugu lake region based on multispectral remote sensing, firstly, this paper introduces the methods of remote sensing image enhancement, correction, fusion, interpretation and classification based on the SPOT-5 panchromatic wave band and ASTER multispectral data, secondly, statistics and analysis about the land types of the study region have been done, and evaluates the precision of the fused image classification result based on the judgment error matrix. Finally, this paper briefly evaluates the land use degree and ecological environment of the study region and points out the potential of multispectral remote sensing applied in land use survey.

The strong earthquake struck on 12 May 2008 destroyed numerous houses in Wenchuan, Sichuan, China. This earthquake escalated the scale of existing geological disasters, undermined the stability of earthquake-prone zones, and triggered landslides and many other hidden disasters. In addition, many aftershocks and heavy rainfalls have prompted secondary disasters and consequently, the actual damages have been doubled in terms of scale and magnitude. Since some regions there are no longer appropriate for people to live, temporary housing and post-disaster reconstruction are badly needed. Recent advances in remote sensing and geospatial technologies have promoted their successful applications in siting engineering. Because of different research backgrounds, geological disasters and vegetation density were rarely incorporated as primary parameters for siting assessment. Based on the principles of avoiding active faults and encouraging synthetic prevention of geological disasters, we performed a locating analysis using part of the Wenchuan County as a case. Six major parameters were used to build a siting model, including geological disasters, vegetation index, stream systems, faults, terrain slope, and elevation. The results show that the proposed method can provide useful information for decision-making in the selection of temporary housing and post-disaster reconstruction.

Land is an essential resource for economic and social development. Land resources investigation is important yet quite challenging. Geospatial technologies such as remote sensing (RS), global positioning system (GPS), and geographic information systems (GIS) have been utilized to support the second national land resources survey initiated by the Chinese central government since 2007. In this paper, we analyze the feasibility of using the remote sensing technology to support the second land resources survey and discuss the method of processing and interpreting remotely sensed data. We conclude that the remote sensing technology is critical to the completion of the second national land resources survey.

This paper discusses the use of remote sensing for monitoring mineral resources exploration and the environmental consequences in the mining environment. The study area is located in Huludao, China, which is one of the most important molybdenum mining regions in this country. Three-scale remotely sensed data are used in this study: 1)1:200000 scale remote sensing data, including TM/ETM, CBERS-02, and Beijing-1 for the identification of the mining regions; 2) 1:50000 scale remote sensing data (e.g., SPOT-5 image) for the interpretation of the mineral exploration regions; 3) 1:10000 scale remote sensing data (e.g., QUICKBIRD image) for the investigation of environmental consequences of mineral exploration, such as transgressed mining, land use, and pollutions. Different techniques are used to process the different scale of images. DEM data were used to improve the recognition of mineral resources exploitation sites from remotely sensed images, particularly help identify mining objects and calculate the area of the sites. In addition, the national mineral resources exploration and exploitation survey data were used to help identify whether the exploitation regions are legal or not.

In this paper, we introduce hyperspectral remote sensing with the focus on several key techniques including dimension reduction, image de-noise, classification, and so on. Then, we describe an application of hyperspectral remote sensing for geological mapping in the northeastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Because of the complexity of geological environment, the application of hyperspectral remote sensing for geological mapping can't simply rely on field spectrum measuring. We recommend a combined use of the field-based spectrum measurements and manually select samples would be the most appropriate for accurate geological mapping.

In this paper, Pudong New Area in Shanghai was selected as the study area, and medium resolution Landsat TM/ETM+ and CBERS (China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite) images were used as data source. Two classification methods were applied to generate land cover maps: Maximum Likelihood Classifier (MLC) and a hierarchical method based on the V-I-S model (H-VIS). After comparing the results derived from these two methods, H-VIS model provides more accurate results than MLC. By analyzing the land cover change from 1989 to 2008, it was found that agricultural land has decreased greatly, while impervious surface area (ISA, including residential and commercial/industrial/traffic land) has increased year by year. In order to better monitor urbanization, diversity index, shape index, fractal dimension and isolation were selected to analyze the landscape pattern in the study area. The results show that the complexity of landscape structure and the fragmentation of the landscape increased from 1989 to 2008, however, the intensity and tendency of the landscape changes varied during the two comparative periods: 1989-2001 and 2001-2008. Finally, using data obtained from image interpretation and other data source, land cover change patterns and their driving forces, including economy, population and policies were analyzed.

Land use/cover change (LUCC) is one of the most important fields of study in global environmental change research. Decades of dynamic change of cropland caused by human activities is an important topic in LUCC research. Minqin is located in Gansu province in northwest China, where the landscape configuration is fragile. In recent years, the environmental problems such as vegetation destruction and desertification became more and more serious. And there was a huge change in Minqin's cropland, which is an important factor to the environmental change in this area. Through the integration of Geography Information System (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS) technology, this paper figured out the dynamic changes of cropland in Minqin, with a source data of Landsat TM products in 1989, 2000, 2005 and 2008. The results showed that there was a tendency of cropland transferring from downriver to upriver, which was a consequence of the advance of desertification.

Land use/cover change (LUCC) is one of the most sensitive factors that show the interactions between human activities and ecological environments. In loess hilly and gully regions, to prevent soil loss and achieve better ecological environments, soil conservation measures have been taken during the past decades. This research attempts to detect land cover changes of Xihe ecological demonstration region by supervised classification to evaluate the effect of soil conservation measures. Support Vector Machines (SVM) classifier was applied for its ability to produce reliable classifications using small training samples. RBF kernel was finally employed for it nonlinearly maps samples into a higher dimensional space. Multi-source images of about one and a half decades were acquired for change detection, including Landsat TM and ETM+, CBERS2B CCD images. To minimize seasonal impacts, post-classification comparison method was employed for image processing. Unified land use classification plan was set up for all the images. The accuracy of classification was evaluated using more than 300 ground truth points mainly identified from high resolution Quickbird and CBERS2B HR images. The trend of land cover changes were detected and analyzed, and the relationship between land cover changes and human activities have been probed preliminarily. Result shows the ecological environments of the study area had deteriorated to a large extent in the first period, while were greatly bettered in the second period and controlling human activities or consciously exerting active human activities is an effective way to improve ecological environments.

The main purpose of this study was to develop a methodology for classification of Landsat imagery for mountain area cover type mapping. Single-stage classification and multi-stage iterative classification were evaluated to determine which classification of satellite imagery could be employed to obtain accurate land cover information in Mentougou district located in western Beijing with diverse topography. TM data used in the study consists of one quarter-scene acquired on 19 June, 2001. The use of ancillary information in the process of deriving thematic maps from satellite imagery was analyzed. Field surveyed data were not only used for the production of the vegetation map of Mentougou but for the ground information of the land covers in the study area Other ancillary data layers such as topography was used in the analysis. Five classification methods were used for classifying the TM data in the study: 1) single-stage classification, 2) single-stage classification with DEM analysis, 3) single-stage classification with PCA analysis, 4) iterative classification with band selection, and unsupervised classification. The accuracy of each classification is expressed as an error matrix from which the Kappa statistic and its large sample variance are derived. The results indicate that the iterative multi-stage classification approach was significantly better than the single-stage classification approach. And this organizational methodology for classification is feasible and reliable in mountain areas image classification.

In this paper we used an approach that applies the improved EVI, NDWI and spatial-gradient analysis, to reduce the mixed information problems and ameliorate extraction technique based on the analysis in multi-spectral remote sensing images and Vegetation Indexes. CBERS-02B CCD image data were used to study the principle and method of quickly extracting the rock-desertification information in Wuchuan County, Guizhou Province. 186 out of 203 sites were verified as rock desertification sites by field work. The results show that 12 sites were misclassified, 5 unclassified, and the overall accuracy is 91.8%.

In the terrestrial carbon cycle, gross primary production (GPP), net primary production (NPP), and heterotrophic respiration and their corresponding geographical and seasonal variations are the key components. NPP, the difference between GPP and autotrophic respiration, is an important ecosystem process. Estimating NPP is essential for evaluating the carbon balance and understanding the effects of climate change on vegetation. In mountain areas, irregular terrain significantly affects spatial variations of climatic variables and the reflectance of pixels in remote sensing imagery. Consequently, the variations perhaps affect the estimation of net primary productivity (NPP). A Photosynthetic curve model based on a new vegetation index derived from universal pattern decomposition(VIUPD), is used to analyze topographic influences on NPP by evaluating topographic effects on primary input data to the model, including both VIUPD and climatic data. VIUPD is the vegetation index derived from universal pattern decomposition method, which is independent of sensor band-spectral characters. A typical green coniferous forest in Yoshino Mountain, Japan, was employed as the study area. The results show that the average NPP is significantly increased after removing topographic influences on VIUPD; the average NPP has a relatively minimal change when only topographic effects on climatic data are considered. When both topographic effects on VIUPD and climatic data are considered, the average NPP is 1.80kgm-2yr-1, which is very similar to the ground measurement result of 1.74 kgm-2yr-1.

Forest canopy height is an important input for ecosystem and highly correlated with aboveground biomass at the landscape scale. In this paper, we make efforts to extract the maximum canopy height using GLAS waveform combination with the terrain index in sloped area where LiDAR data were present. Where LiDAR data were not present, the optical remote sensing data were used to estimate the canopy height at broad scale regions. We compared four aspatial and spatial methods for estimating canopy height integrating large footprint Lidar system (GLAS) and Landsat ETM+: ordinary least squares regression, ordinary kriging, cokriging, and cokriging of regression residuals. The results show that (1) the terrain index helps to extract the forest canopy height over a range of slopes. Regression models explained for 51.0% and 84.0% of variance for broadleaf and needle forest respectively; (2) Some improvements were achieved by adding additional remote sensing data sets. The integrated model that cokriged regression residuals were preferable to either the aspatial or spatial models alone. The integrated modeling strategy is most suitable for estimating forest canopy height at locations unsampled by lidar.

The vegetation cover is a major feature for an ecological system, especially in arid and semi-arid areas. Percent vegetation cover (PVC) is an integrated index that can indicate vegetation community dynamics. This study aims to use MODIS and TM data to characterize the spatio-temporal dynamics of vegetation covers in Shihezi area, Xinjiang / China. The 16-day composite NDVI of the second half July of 2001 to 2008 was extracted from the MODIS bands. The land cover data was derived from TM data to get better spatial resolution. The dimidiate pixel model was applied to estimate the PVC and the PVC images were classified into five grade categories based on the value of each pixel, and the area for each category was also calculated. The results show that: 1) the area of the low vegetation covers and the middle vegetation covers in the study area in July 2008 reduced 9.18% and 18.53%, respectively with respect to that of 2001 while the area of high vegetation covers is 0.66 times bigger than that of 2001; 2) although the fluctuation of the vegetation covers was observed, the main trend indicates that the green vegetation cover has been recovered ecologically from 2001 to 2008; 3) the natural precipitation has larger impact on the sparsely vegetated areas with a correlation coefficient of 0.82 between the PVC and precipitation in the study area. Finally this case study also demonstrates the usefulness of the MODIS data in the monitoring of vegetation cover dynamics and ecological rehabilitation.

Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) system has a unique capability for estimating accurately forest canopy height, which has a direct relationship and can provide better understanding to the aboveground carbon storage. This study aimed to test the capacity of large-footprint full waveform LiDAR for estimating forest canopy height and aboveground biomass in the cool temperate forest over sloped terrain. The full waveform data of the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) onboard the Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) was used to achieve the aim in Wangqing of Changbai Mountain. The maximum canopy height was first regressed as a function of waveform extent and the elevation change for evaluating the Lefsky's model. Then an improved model of maximum forest canopy height against the logarithm of waveform extent and the elevation change was tested for improving the accuracy of forest canopy height estimation. Finally the aboveground forest biomass was related to ICESat-derived maximum canpy height from the improved model. The results showed that the Lefsky's model and the improved model explained 51% and 74% of variation of maximum canopy height for the terrain slope range of 0~15°, respectively, and the improved model performed better than the Lefsky's model for estimating forest maximum canopy height over the sloped terrain. The ICESat-derived maximum canpy height from the improved model explained 52% of variation of the aboveground forest biomass. The results indicated that the ICESat-GLAS full waveforms are promising for estimating maximum forest canopy height and aboveground biomass in the study area.

Human activities are important factors leading to the change of regional land utilization/coverage. In order to reveal the influence of human activities on the oasis landscape ecosystem in arid area, in this article, the various landscapes of human acting regions in 2000 and 2005 were compared and analyzed for Xinjiang Manas County of West-China using remotely sensed data, which showed that there is a great increasing tendency in farmland and urban landscape area, however, a dramatically decreasing tendency in forest and grass areas and patch numbers. Meanwhile, the internal structure of forest and grass landscape also changes greatly. The main driving factors of this change are agricultural technology and innovation of agricultural organization system, which strengthen the replacement of forest and grass landscape by farmland. And at the same time, the quality and areas of some forests and grassland loom optimizing tendency with the policy of "change the farmland back to forest and grassland" implemented and ecological protecting forest constructed.

Remote sensing is an effective tool to retrieve leaf area index (LAI) at local, regional and global scales. Two approaches are currently employed for this purpose. The first is the empirical relationship approach. Map of LAI is produced according to the relationship between ground measured LAI and spectral vegetation index (VI) calculated from remote sensing signals. Inversion of radiation transfer or geometric optical models is another algorithm to retrieve LAI. The objective of this study is to investigate the ability of two approaches to retrieve forest LAI in red soil hilly region of Jian city, Jiangxi province. The applicability of empirical relationship approach was studied through analyzing the relationship between measured LAI and various vegetation indices calculated from Landsat-5 TM data, including SR (Simple Ratio), NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index), RSR (Reduced Simple Ratio), SAVI (Soil Adjusted Vegetation Index), EVI (Enhanced Vegetation Index). It was found that NDVI is the best predictor of LAI (R²=0.6811, N=47). A BRDF-based inversion algorithm was used to inverse LAI from MODIS 500m reflectance products. LAI derived using empirical relationship and BRDF-based inversion methods shows certain similarity and demonstrates that these two algorithms are both applicable for retrieving forest LAI in this region. The average value of inversed LAI and the MODIS LAI was about 12.2% and 16% lower compared with LAI retrieved using high resolution TM-5 data. Considerable difference existed between LAI estimated using the BRDF-based inversion approach and the MODIS LAI product although these LAI datasets were produced using same reflectance data.

Land degradation is a major environmental problem internationally. Soil degradation is one of the key factors of land degradation, which is related to susceptibility to erosion, soil suitability, and soil characteristics especially at regional scale. It is important and meaningful to evaluate objectively land degradation at regional scale. The study is to present the classification approaches for land degradation by Degraded Soil Line Index (DSLI) and object-oriented method by determination of land degradation spectral response units (DSRU) compared to the spectral angle mapping (SAM) method using Hyperion image data for mapping land degradation. The method was tested in a study area located in Hengshan county in ShaanXi province, China, where is in the agriculture-pasture mixed area in Loess Plateau in China with complex physical geographical situation. The results showed that the three methods of SAM, DSLI and DSRU have the ability to map land degradation and degraded soil classes, and the performance of the methods of DSLI and SAM is different and DSLI is prior to SAM for land degradation mapping in the study area. Moreover, the results also showed that the object-oriented analysis method based on DSRU approach is valid for extraction of land degradation information and clearly shows the degraded land classes with an overall accuracy of 0.88 and Kappa coefficients of 0.86.

The application of eco-environment information management and the Land Use and Cover Change (LUCC) models in system construction and data processing has formed a comparative matured system, but coupling using of them in the information service system construction of eco-environment has not been thoroughly investigated. At present, the management decision-making of the eco-environment urgently needs a kind of integrated, efficient and practical technology to achieve intensive management. Because the eco-environment resources characterized by the broad distribution and the complex structure, the 3S (GPS, GIS and RS) and other key technologies must be relied on to achieve the targets of "automatic, efficient, informational and precise". In this paper, an information platform was designed systematically according to the needs of dynamic monitoring and information management for ecoenvironment using J2EE technology, WebGIS technology integrated with traditional MIS/OA seamlessly, by means of spatial database, 3S integration technology, three-dimensional virtual simulation, computer network technology, etc. A database of urban infrastructure was established, and the LUCC model service technology was embedded into the platform for its significance on the eco-environment. This system can automatically analyze and classify different dates of RS image data with the ability to dynamically export the LUCC maps, and to synchronously update the information resources and network database. Results show that this system enhances the awareness as well as ability of analyzing and forecasting the dynamic process of LUCC so as to provide a macro decision-making basis for the relevant departments.

Mounting evidence suggests that the complex interactions between soil, vegetation, and the atmosphere play a larger role in regulating atmospheric conditions than initially assumed. Soil moisture is an important parameter in a variety of environmental processes, such as the global hydrologic cycle and the functioning of ecosystems. It is a key variable in controlling the exchange of water and heat energy between the land surface and the atmosphere through evaporation and plant transpiration. Its information is valuable to a wide range of fields concerned with weather and climate, runoff potential and flood control, soil erosion and slope failure, reservoir management, geotechnical engineering, water quality, and etc.; yet, information on soil moisture at large scales is meager. It is of interest to retrieve soil moisture by method of remote sensing. In this study, according to the characteristics of ATI and VSWI, a retrieval method of soil moisture that integrated ATI with VSWI was utilized in an example of the Shiyang River Basin. The results indicate that the soil moisture extremely anatomizes with the local reality in the spatial distribution, and the average error is 9.089%, the biggest error is no more than 13.410%, the smallest error is only 2.951%. So this method can effectively make up for the ATI and VSWI inherent deficiencies and achieve complement of their advantages to improve the accuracy of the retrieval. It is worth promoting.

The water resources utilization in the arid area of northeastern Tianshan Mountain in Xinjiang attracts a lot of attention from research community and government. Although some problems such as the change of the water resource and suitable utility of water have been addressed before, however, less concern has been on the long-time human activity effects, so the ecological and environment processes of the Oasis areas need to be paid more attention. This research took Qitai oasis as the study area, located in northeastern Tianshan Mountain, to analyze the development and spatial evolution of the artificial oasis since 18th century using historical literature, remote sensing technology and field-surveyed data. Then the changes of natural oasis grass land and the artificial oasis were identified for studying the environmental evolution. The results show that the artificial oasis increased due to the improvement of irrigating technology. Qitai oasis has improved towards optimized pattern from the 18th century to 2006. Cultivated land increased slowly from 18 century to 1970s because irrigation technology had not enough change to provide more irrigation. As a result, when cultivated land enlarged fast influenced by policy from the end of 1950s to 1970s, environmental burden increased due to the lack of sufficient water. After 1970s, cultivated land increased heavily with an increasing productivity due to the introduction of new irrigating trenches and the use of groundwater pumping facilities. In the meanwhile, the eco-environment of Bahudi grass land which is typical natural oasis seemed much improved with an increase from 1997 to 2006. Salinized land turned heavily into grassland from 1973-2006 and thus the low grassland changed towards middle and high covered grassland gradually.

Desertification is one of the most serious ecological and environmental problems in the arid and semi-arid areas of western China. This study demonstrated a cell-based modeling approach to monitor and evaluate the land degradation using remotely sensed data in Shihezi area, Xinjiang, China. Two-date Landsat TM imagery of 2000 and 2008 was used to derive factors such as land surface temperature, NDVI and soil moisture etc. The preprocessing of the images was conducted and the DN values were converted into albedo. The mono-window algorithm was applied to the TM band 6 to compute land surface temperature, and the regressive relationship between Temperature Vegetation Dryness Index (TVDI) and field-surveyed soil moisture was modeled and then used to derive soil moisture factor. After that a weighted linear combination of those factors was applied to create an integrated index to characterize the desertification and degradation of land in the study area. The resultant index was then categorized into four classes: non-desertificated, slightly-desertificated, moderate-desertificated, and heavily-desertificated, and finally a map of desertification was created and used to analyze the land degradation in the Shihezi area. The map shows that the degree of desertification diminished gradually from north to south. Due to the graze control policy and land rehabilitation, the threatening of desertification in 2008 is smaller than that in 2000, and especially in the northern and middle areas. Field verification also supports the results positively and thus the map of desertification can be used as a reference for land management and regional environmental protection.

With the support of MSS images of the middle and late 1970s, TM images of the early 1990s and TM/ETM images of 2004, grassland degradation in the riverhead area of the Yellow River was investigated. The spatial and temporal characteristics of the grassland degradation were analyzed. The results showed that the grassland degradation patterns were formed basically in the middle and late 1970s. The grassland degradation is obviously characterized by fragmentation, coverage decrease, swamp meadow drying, sandification and salification. The spatial heterogeneity of the type and degree of grassland degradation was significant. Sandification and salification mainly occurred in north-western alpine steppe, coverage decrease mainly in north central alpine steppe, and fragmentation and coverage decrease mainly in south-western alpine meadow. The grassland degradation is a continuous change process which has a large influenced area and is in a long-term scale. Slight and moderate degradation are more common, while serious degradation only occurs in some local regions. Moderate and serious degradation tend to increase since mid and late 1970s. Large-scale and moderate-degree degradation and desertification are generally typical characteristics of the grassland degradation in the riverhead area of the Yellow River.

An evapotranspiration model based on the energy balance for different vegetation types in arid area was built in the study, and applied to the natural ecological system of Lake Ebinur wetland nature reserve in Xinjiang. The spatial-temporal dynamic change of the vegetation evapotranspiration in the study area was computed, and the evapotranspiration of three typical vegetations was analyzed and compared. The ground meteorological data were used to test the model. The results show that the evapotranspiration of all the natural system is about 10mm/d, and the maximum is over 20mm/d and occurs between May and August. The evapotranspiration of three typical arid vegetations was estimated in sequence of Populus euphratica Oliv. Tamarix chinensis Lour. Haloxylon ammodendron (Meye)Bge. Finally, it is suggested that the ground surface vegetation types and arid characteristics are most important in the establishment of the evapotranspiration model of natural ecological system based on energy balance in arid areas.

This study constructs a soil respiration model, which includes three variables: air temperature, precipitation and soil character using a semi-mechanistic-empirically statistical model by James W. Raich. The soil characteristics are variables introduced into the model in the study, including soil texture, soil depth, PH and soil organic carbon. Then the model was used to estimate the gross and illustrate spatial-temporal patterns of soil respiration based on the data obtained monthly across the arid land in northwest China from 1961 to 2001. The solar energy efficiency model was used to survey NPP, and the NEP on 20 years scale from 1982 to 2001. Thus, the following conclusions can be come up with: (1) from 1961 to 2001, the temperature and wetness had an increasing trend in the arid land in northwest China, while the range of precipitation variation was greater than before. Such climate change accelerated NPP and soil respiration, and declined NEP on a total level. The carbon sink function of arid land of Northwest China was weakening. (2) Under the background of increasing temperature and wetness, human cultivation accelerated soil respiration of the oasis. Thus, NEP of the oasis was declined. Thereby, the carbon sink function of oasis was weakening and soil degradation happened. 3) Moisture is a more important factor than temperature in the main processes of terrestrial carbon cycle in the arid areas in Northwest China. More attention should be paid to the precipitation in modeling dominant processes of the carbon cycle process in the arid areas.

The chlorophyll-a concentration is a major water quality parameter for coastal remote sensing. The water quality parameters of the Sishili Bay in Yantai's coastal region were obtained at the same time when the hyperspectral remote sensing data were in situ measured. According to the principle of the three-band model, the hyperspectral remote sensing data in situ measurements were averaged to the same band range of Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) (660-670nm, 703-713nm and 750-758nm) and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) (662-672nm and 743-753nm). The obtained results show that there was a good linear relationship between the chlorophyll-a concentration and simulated [(B₇^-1-B₉^-1)×B₁₀] of MERIS and [B₁₃^-1×B₁₅] of MODIS. The determination coefficients were 0.714 and 0.753 for the simulated MERIS and MODIS, with the root mean squared errors (RMSE) of 1.48μg•L^-1 and 1.38μg•L^-1, respectively. The result demonstrated that the three-band model could be applied to retrieve chlorophyll-a concentration in Yantai's coastal region even if the chlorophyll-a concentration was lower than 10μg•L^-1. However, MODIS and MERIS data still needs to examine mapping chlorophyll-a concentration of Yantai's coastal waters.

The accuracy of geographic location is important for island investigations by remote sensing. However, many islands are far away from land, and it is impossible to obtain accurate ground control points (GCPs) that could be used for geometric correction. We propose a geometric correction method without using GCP to orientate islands accurately. The test data are four SPOT-5 images that were obtained from the same orbit and at the same time; one of these images does not include islands but allows one or more GCPs to be acquired. Firstly, we initially correct the image with GCPs by using a physical model, metadata, and a digital elevation model derived from SRTM data, but the accuracy is slightly better than 50 m. We calculate the offset between the corrected image and its GCPs and use this offset to correct the digital elevation model to make its coordinates to agree with that from the metadata. Then, we further correct the image by using a physical model, metadata and the corrected digital elevation model to suppress the hypsographical distortion. Finally, We use an affine transformation model to calculate the distortion parameters from the corrected image by using its GCPs, and further used these parameters to correct the other three images without GCPs. Our experiment is quite encouraging as when some islands are 159 km away from land we still achieve a location accuracy better than 5 m.

A cruise from Luchaogang Dock to Shengsi Island was carried out on 15^th August 2008 for acquiring 16 surface water samples in the Changjiang River estuary, China. Sea surface salinity (SSS) and CDOM absorption and fluorescence spectroscopy measurements were obtained. Over a salinity range of 8.4-26.5^o/oo, CDOM absorption coefficient at 355nm ranged from 0.42-1.44m^-1, and the mean value for a_355nm was 0.86 m^-1, showing relatively variable optical properties of the waters in the Changjiang River estuary region at the same scale and range as that in other Chinese estuaries and coastal waters. The values for S ranged from 14.9 to 20.1μm^-1, with the average value of 17.1μm^-1. Three distinct principal fluorophore types including tryptophan-like (T), UV humic-like (A) and visible-terrestrial humic-like (C) fluorophores were observed here, but marine fluorophore (visible-marine humic fluorophore (M) was absent in all sampling stations, suggesting its dominant controlling role for the diluted water masses in the Changjiang River. Both the aCDOM and the S value as well as the normalized concentration of FCDOM tend to decrease from the inner to the outer estuary; their strong opposite relationship with salinity imply a conservative behavior of terrestrial source matters in the Changjiang River estuary during the mixture of the Changjiang diluted waters and marine waters, suggesting that it is appropriate to adopt CDOM optical properties as a tracer of the diluted water masses in the Changjiang River and its terrestrial source matters.

By using MODIS data, we investigated the spatial and temporal variation of the attenuation depths (Z₉₀) in the Bohai Sea. While Z₉₀ was highly variable, it increased from the nearshore to the central Bohai Sea. In the Laizhou Bay, Liaodong Bay and Bohai Bay, Z₉₀ was less than 4.5 m, mostly below 3m; while Z₉₀ increased in the northern Bohai Straits, the western Liaodong Bay estuary, and the central Bohai Sea. This spatial pattern has been consistent with the findings reported by several previous studies. Moreover, the wavelength of the maximum Z₉₀ shifted toward longer wavelengths when the water turbidity increased in the Bohai Sea. We also found that the Z₉₀ varied by seasons. The maximum Z₉₀ occurred in summers but the minimum Z₉₀ may be in springs or winters.

Remote sensing has widely been used to study suspended sediment distributions due to its synoptic and repetitive coverage. Using previous in situ data and Landsat imagery, we estimate suspended sediment concentrations (SSC) in order to understand the transport and distribution of suspended sediments in the Nanhui nearshore area, China. During an ebb tide period, the area with the maximum turbidity was observed along the southern Nanhui nearshore area and the maximum SSC value was 1.916g/l. During a flood tide period, the area with the maximum turbidity moved northwards and the maximum SSC value was 1.400 g/l. The northern Nanhui nearshore area suffered from the strong current discharge from the South Passage, its eastern area was affected by wind waves, and its southern area was influenced by the tidal currents from the Hangzhou Bay. These processes were responsible for the southern Nanhui nearshore area extending southeastwards and sediments in the northern Nanhui nearshore area.

In this paper, the conventional GPS kinematic positioning method and precise point positioning method for ocean surface monitoring are briefly presented and their corresponding pros and cons for sea level monitoring are also discussed. Then, algorithms for ocean surface parameter estimation from the GPS height component are introduced, which uses the spectral analysis method to extract sea level tide and sea wave parameters. A 48 hours GPS field data set by GPS buoy is used to evaluate the methods presented here. First, the height component analysis is performed to obtain the low-frequency and high-frequency signals which consist of ocean tide and wave components. Then, a wavelet transformation is performed to the high frequency series in order to detect the main wave period of about 10 second. The results show that GPS kinematic positioning technique can not only be used for ocean positioning but can also be used to monitor the ocean surface.

Estuaries are biologically productive and diverse coastal areas that are also vital to commerce, transportation, and recreation activities. In this paper, we demonstrated the potential of hyperspectral data for monitoring water quality in estuary. Many historical surveys showed that the water quality in Sheyang estuary was mostly deteriorated by the rich of dissolved oxygen (DO), chemical oxygen demand (COD), nitrate nitrogen (NTN), nitrous nitrogen (NSN), ammoniacal nitrogen (AMN) and total phosphorus (TP). Based on the regression analysis between spectra radiometer measurements and ground reference data acquired synchronously, the sensitive bands for the estimation of the above six parameters were decided. An IDL-based atmospheric correction code, complemented with an air/water interface correction, was used to convert Hyperion at-sensor radiances into subsurface irradiance reflectance values. These reflectance values were comparable to in situ reflectance spectra measured during Hyperion's overpass, except at longer wavelengths (beyond 910 nm), where the reflectance values were contaminated by severe atmospheric adjacency effects. The Hyperion spectra curves exhibit band to band spikes or dips and a selection of single bands could match some spikes. The binning of bands was used instead of single channel to develop the hyperspectral models. The model validation have relative RMSE values basically less than 30% but for TP validation, which indicates that Hyperion imagery could act as a landmark for moving forward the operational use of RS-related technologies. Integrated with traditional survey procedures, hyperspectral data could provide useful information for the dynamic monitoring of water quality in estuary.

With the reduction of sediments into the sea, the area of reed wetland, which is the key habitat of red-crowned crane, has been shrinking in the Yellow River Delta Nature Reserve, China. With Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) images and field observations, we mapped the reed wetland using the knowledge inference technology. Six wetland types were extracted using a supervised classification method. To resolve the confusions between reeds and other wetland types, a set of rules were established. Firstly, reed wetland was separated from mudflat wetland, rearing and shrimp pond and water body by using the normalized digital vegetation index (NDVI). Secondly, reed wetland was distinguished from paddy field by using image texture information. Thirdly, the reed wetland was separated from the Chinese tamarisk by using the principal transformation. All these rules were built by using ERDAS Imagine's knowledge engineer. Reed wetland classification was conducted by using the neighbor analysis technology. The accuracy assessment shows that the knowledge-based classification obtained an overall accuracy of 89.02% and kappa coefficient of 0.89, which was better than the traditional supervised classification.

The spatial distribution and change analysis of Spartina can be derived by threshold classification of Landsat-5 TM images of 2002 and 2007 in Jiangsu coast. Moreover, the impact of Spartina's distribution change on the ecoenvironment in coastal area was analyzed. The result indicates that the area of Spartina rose from 128 km² in 2002 to 187 km² in 2007, with an annual growth rate of 46.1%.The area of Spartina is so large that it has a significant impact on the eco-environment. Thus, the intensive and systematic research on Spartina is of great importance.

The research on ice-snow gained the concerns of a lot of researchers in ecology, geography, meteorology and so on in the past years, and a series of achievements in scientific research has been gained. Especially, remarkable advances have been made in ice-snow science after the application of remote sensing techniques. A snow mountain area in Qinghai-Tibet Plateau was chosen as the study area. The DEM was constructed by use of the peculiar stereo data collection function of HRS on SPOT5. The three-dimensional (3D for short) monitoring model was set up, and the superficial area was computed based on the TIN model. At last, the authors synthetically estimated the ice-snow resources status combining to the results gained before. The aim of this study is to provide theory and scientific evidence for the efficient management of ice-snow resource, and furthermore provide scientific evidence for the macroscopical adjust and control of water resource and sustainable development in China.

The Heilongjiang Basin (HLB) located between N43° to N57° and E108° to E141° is a seasonal snow covered region. The monitoring of snow covered areas (SCA) and snow water equivalent (SWE) at regional scale are essential for climate and hydrological applications. Optical and microwave remote sensing have their own advantages and disadvantages for monitoring snow covered areas. In this study, we present the preliminary validation results of snow cover product produced by National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) of USA using satellite data from Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-EOS (AMSR-E) on board Aqua satellite and optical remote sensing data from Terra/MODIS over the HLB region. The data consist of snow cover and snow water equivalent product for the winters from 2002 to 2008 of coarse resolution and relative fine resolution of MODIS snow cover data for the winter of 2007-08. Our primary result indicates that AMSR-E snow product tends to overestimate snow covered area of the region, and snow cover extent derived from MOD10A2 more objectively reflects the truth. Our result also indicates that elevation is not a significant factor affecting snow covered area distribution in our study region, however, land use/cover do affect the accuracy of the snow cover product, especially in forested distribution areas. In the future, we will have several more test sites in Northeast China, representing the two main types of land-cover categories: forested and agricultural areas for accurately snow cover monitoring.

The Tibetan Plateau, called "the third pole" of the Earth by its highest altitude, is a very sensitive area for hydrological cycle and climatic change. To estimate and map the snow covered areas of the Tibetan Plateau is very important for the regional climatic change and hydrological cycle. The fractional snow cover of an image pixel is estimated with a linear mixture approach, where the reflectance of a "mixed" pixel is represented as sum of the reflectance of each pure land cover type weighted by their respective area proportion in the Instrument Field of View (IFOV). A method based on linear spectral unmixing using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data in the Tibetan Plateau was presented and validated by Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) 15m data in this study. The change of the snow covers in the whole Tibetan Plateau was also analyzed. In the year of 2004 the area of the snow covers increased much from October to February of the following year. However, then declined to be a relatively small area until September of 2005. SRTM DEM data was applied to identify the relationship between snow distribution and terrain altitude.

Remote sounding of the atmosphere by global positioning system (GPS) radio occultation utilising a GPS satellite and a receiver aboard a low Earth orbiting (LEO) satellite has been proved successful in providing accurate profiles of atmospheric refractivity and water vapor. This technology has generated great interest in atmospheric and climate research communities. The technology is more suitable to monitor the environmental changes in the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau than space borne GPS occultation. Unlike space borne and airborne GPS occultation, near-space vehicle lies inside the atmosphere, hence the conventional inversion algorithm cannot be applied and new algorithm must be developed. The potential for inversion scheme is exploited.

This research revealed the overall trend of change in south Qiangtang, Namco watershed by extracting multi-temporal TUPU using interpretation results of several remotely sensed images from1992 to 2005. The result of TUPU deriving revealed that there has been a sharp augment in lake area extension in the study area during the past 15 years. Typical lakes were used to analyze some characteristics of the change. The steady increase of area was extracted as well. By analyzing the variation information from multi-temporal TUPU together with the meteorological data, the rapid extension of lakes in Tibet Plateau are attributed to several factors, such as the average annual precipitation, which could have affected area of the lakes indirectly by reacting to the movement of glaciers.

Snow coverage plays a significant role in the Earth's water cycle and is sensitive and informative indicators of climate change. Recently, snow coverage in the Qilian Mountain great changed and caused great changes of the ecological environment in the Shiyang River. In this paper, remote sensing imagines were used to calculate the snow coverage, vegetation coverage and water resource. The result indicated that the entire area of the glacier snow was fluctuated on the Qilian Mountains region, having linear and increasing trend from 1997 to 2006. In the eastern and middle of Qilian Mountains, the snow coverage tends to decrease, but in the western, snow coverage tends to increase. As a whole, vegetation coverage is decreasing in Shiyang River Basin. Sparse vegetation and density vegetation were the worst degradation. Water resource in the downriver of Shiyang River (Hongya Mountain Reservoir) decreased.

The traditional opinion is that "the bottom of the river valley was formed after the terrace I". In recent years, many site investigations have shown that thick layers of drift are well developed along the rivers, which are related to the last glaciation in Western China. The thickness of this drift is generally 40-70m. Time dating shows that the age of the lower parts of this drift is 20-25 thousand years. This means that the boundary between the bedrock and the drift was formed 25 thousand years ago, which can be related to the last inter-glacial period (45-25 thousand years ago). Paleoclimate studies show that the last glaciation can be divided into three sub-periods: a sub-glacial period 70-45 thousand years ago, a subinterglacial period 45-25 thousand years ago, and a sub-glacial period 25-15 thousand years ago. River erosion is related to interglacial periods or sub-interglacial periods and river accumulation is related to glacial or sub-glacial periods. The rapid uplift of the crust and the fast ablation of glaciers in the last inter-glacial period, gave the rivers huge erosive power, which caused intensive river valley erosion in the late Pleistocene in Western China. This erosive event happened after the formation of the highest level of terrace in the valley. The river cut down quickly to the bedrock, and consequently the valleys were backfilled in different accumulation phases during the Last Glacial Maximum. After that, the river resumed undercutting and formed the terraces II, I and the present river bed deposit.

Differential interferometric synthetic aperture radar (DInSAR) technique has been widely accepted as a powerful tool to map surface deformation. To quantitatively evaluate the surface displacement caused by Wenchuan Earthquake on 12 May 2008 in Sichuan Province, China, a series of interferograms were generated from 25 ALOS/PALSAR image pairs, and the surface displacement was then mapped. According to the wrapped differential interferogram, the main rupture fault was plotted with an orientation of North-East 47° and a spanning length of approximately 230 km. The serious affected region with area of 5,000 km² and the affected region with area of 250,000 km² were also mapped. Along the radar look of sight (LOS), it is estimated that the ground surface displaced approximated a maximum of 57 cm and 119 cm away from and towards the satellite respectively, i.e. the vertical displacement was a maximum of 73 cm and 150 cm down lift and uplift respectively. The capability of DInSAR technique and ALOS PALSAR data for co-seismic deformation mapping has been demonstrated and proved to be useful in the surface deformation applications. In addition, some limitations were discussed including the topographic, atmospheric, and orbital errors.

Global Positioning System (GPS) plays an important role in monitoring crustal deformation. Traditional methods for GPS crustal deformation monitoring is mainly based on static positioning, which cannot be used to obtain instantaneous crustal deformation. To monitor crustal deformation in Sichuan, 12 continuous operation GPS reference stations (CORS) have been setup in Sichuan, China. There are 5 GPS stations located at the east side of Longmen mountain fault. GPS data for a period of about 60 seconds has been recorded during Wenchuan earthquake. Using data with 1-second interval from Sichuan GPS network, we compute the kinematic crustal deformation caused by MS 8.0 Wenchuan earthquake to study the crustal deformation characteristics during Wenchuan earthquake. GPS baselines before and after the earthquake were processed by GAMIT, and then the coordinates of all stations were combined by GLOBK using China local frame. After selecting relative stable points from the 12 GPS stations based on GPS data of 4 consecutive days from May 11 to May 14, 2008, we have obtained the kinematic crustal deformations lasting about 60 seconds by using Yaan as a reference station. Results show that the principal displacement direction of the stations in Sichuan GPS network was approximately orthogonal to Longmen mountain fault direction. The principal deformation pattern was expansion towards northwest with periodical vibrations. Mianyang's maximum kinematic horizontal displacement was 49.2cm towards NW50°, Pixian's maximum kinematic horizontal deformation was about 114.1cm towards NW45° and Chengdu's deformation was 21cm toward NE45°. Decomposing the deformation series into Longmen mountain fault direction and its orthogonal direction, the kinematic deformation features of several stations were obtained. Results also show that Mianyan and Pixian moved towards Northwest with small amplitude of swinging during the earthquake. The height of Mianyan decreased 2 cm after uplifting 10 cm in the vertical direction. The height of Pixian fluctuated periodically and the fluctuation range was about ±13 cm.

Due to the adverse weather condition such as raining after the Wenchuan earthquake, the applicability of optical imagery in decision making for mitigating earthquake disasters had been highly restricted. As a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensor possesses all-weather imaging capability, SAR imagery emerges as a very important data source for earthquake rescue operation at the earlier stage. This paper utilizes 4 pairs of ENVISAT ASAR images (3 pre-earthquake, 1 postearthquake) to perform ratio coherence change detection by comparing pre-seismic between post-seismic images over Dujiangyan City and its neighboring areas. The testing results indicate that the interferometric coherence map is sensitive to physical surface changes and show that there were significant changes within the urban area and the main shock had caused substantial damage. This study demonstrates that it is feasible to use SAR images to conduct damage assessment. With the polarization radar technology becoming more sophisticated, radar satellites in decision making for disaster rescue will play more and more important role.

On May 12th 2008, an 8.0 magnitude earthquake struck in Southwest China, triggered massive landslides and created many unstable and dangerous quake lakes. As a secondary disaster of earthquake, Quake Lake usually breaks after damming up a large amount of water and threatens cities and villages in the downstream area. This paper is devoted to modeling the dam break and analyzing the flow hydrograph coming out of the breach for quake lakes with the BREACH method. We simulate the formation of dam breach and the flood discharge with a case of the Tangjiashan Quake Lake, and analyze the hydraulic impacts of dam-break flood on the downstream areas. The results can facilitate the assessment on the flood risk of quake lake caused by earthquake, and also can be used to estimate the magnitude and extent of dambreak flood with Earth observations.

When Wenchuan earthquake struck, the terrain of the region changed violently. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) remote sensing is effective in extracting first hand information. The high resolution images are of great importance in disaster management and relief operations. Back propagation (BP) neural network is an artificial neural network which combines multi-layer feed-forward network and error back-propagation algorithm. It has a strong input-output mapping capability, and does not require the object to be identified obeying certain distribution law. It has strong non-linear features and error-tolerant capabilities. Remotely-sensed image classification can achieve high accuracy and satisfactory error-tolerant capabilities. But it also has drawbacks such as slow convergence speed and can probably be trapped by local minimum points. In order to solve these problems, we have improved this algorithm through setting up self-adaptive training rate and adding momentum factor. UAV high-resolution aerial image in Taoguan District of Wenchuan County is used as data source. First, we preprocess UAV aerial images and rectify geometric distortion in images. Training samples were selected and purified. The image is then classified using the improved BP neural network algorithm. Finally, we compare such classification result with the maximum likelihood classification (MLC) result. Numerical comparison shows that the overall accuracy of maximum likelihood classification is 83.8%, while the improved BP neural network classification is 89.7%. The testing results indicate that the latter is better.

Remote sensing, especially airborne remote sensing, can be an invaluable technique for quick response to natural disasters. Timely acquired images by airborne remote sensing can provide very important information for the headquarters and decision makers to be aware of the disaster situation, and make effective relief arrangements. The image acquisition and processing of Multi-mode Airborne Digital Camera System (MADC) and its application in Wenchuan earthquake disaster monitoring are presented in this paper. MADC system is a novel airborne digital camera developed by Institute of Remote Sensing Applications, Chinese Academy of Sciences. This camera system can acquire high quality images in three modes, namely wide field, multi-spectral (hyper-spectral) and stereo conformation. The basic components and technical parameters of MADC are also presented in this paper. MADC system played a very important role in the disaster monitoring of Wenchuan earthquake. In particular, the map of dammed lakes in Jianjiang river area was produced and provided to the front line headquarters. Analytical methods and information extraction techniques of MADC are introduced. Some typical analytical and imaging results are given too. Suggestions for the design and configuration of the airborne sensors are discussed at the end of this paper.

A mega-earthquake of magnitude 8 of Richter scale occurred in Wenchuan County, Sichuan Province, China on May 12, 2008. The earthquake inflicted heavy loss of human lives and properties. The Wenchuan earthquake induced geological disasters, house collapse, and road blockage. In this paper, we demonstrate an application of optical remote sensing images acquired from airborne and satellite platforms in assessing the earthquake damages. The high-resolution airborne images were acquired by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). The pre- and post-earthquake satellite images of QuickBird, IKONOS, Landsat TM, ALOS, and SPOT were collected by the Center for Earth Observation & Digital Earth (CEODE), CAS, and some of the satellite data were provided by the United States, Japan, and the European Space Agency. The pre- and post-earthquake remote sensing images integrated with DEM and GIS data were adopted to monitor and analyze various earthquake disasters, such as road blockage, house collapse, landslides, avalanches, rock debris flows, and barrier lakes. The results showed that airborne optical images provide a convenient tool for quick and timely monitoring and assessing of the distribution and dynamic changes of the disasters over the earthquake-struck regions. In addition, our study showed that the optical remote sensing data integrated with GIS data can be used to assess disaster conditions such as damaged farmlands, soil erosion, etc, which in turn provides useful information for the postdisaster reconstruction.

In this paper a new remote sensor on board HJ-1 satellite was used to extract information on landscape destruction. Based on post-earthquake HJ-1 CCD image, landscape change in the Wenchuan earthquake stricken area were recorded. It showed evidence that the spatial distribution of landscape destruction intensified significantly in the valleys of the Min River. Airborne remote sensing with its flexibility and high-resolution can achieve highly accurate natural landscape destruction information by means of human-computer interaction. Landscape change map in the earthquake area by airborne image could be utilized as validation data. Landscape change result obtained by HJ-1 CCD sensor has the relative error of about 16.2% less than that by ADS40 airborne images. This paper also discussed the correction method of landscape change detection using HJ-1 CCD image. The conclusion of this study is that HJ-1 CCD sensor has a great potential in monitoring and assessment of natural hazards.

Based on the coordinates, velocities and their error estimations of GPS and VLBI stations, we used the Delaunay arithmetic forming triangles to approach the surface of the Earth, the Earth's area, volume and their changes in 2003. The feasibility of this method was also verified using stations through plate motion model interpolation. Results show that the geodetic and interpolated data give consistent conclusions. If the equator is taken as the boundary, the northern hemisphere of the Earth is undergoing compressive deformation and the southern hemisphere is undergoing extensional deformation; if the longitude line of 0º-180º is taken as the boundary, the East hemisphere is undergoing compressive deformation, while the western hemisphere is extended; and if the longitude line of 90º-270º is taken as the boundary, the Pacific hemisphere is undergoing compressive deformation and the Atlantic hemisphere is undergoing extensional deformation. The deformation patterns indicate that the earth is still undergoing asymmetrical deformation. Based on the combined data of GPS and VLBI, we obtained that the rate of volume changing is up to -1.5937×1012m3·a-1, corresponding to the Earth radius decreasing by 3-4 mm each year. This indicates that the earth is undergoing compressive deformation as a whole.

This paper adopts time series analysis of the SAR images acquired in 10 phases up to 4-year span over Yancheng city in Jiangsu province. By selecting the SAR image acquired on September 3, 2005 as the master image and the rest of the SAR images as slave images, interferometric processing is carried out and 9 interferograms with terrain features and the deformation information are extracted. In dealing with the 9 differential interferograms utilizing PS technology, terrain features, spatial distribution with stable reflectivity characteristics are successfully determined. After temporal and spatial analysis of the 9 unwrapping interferograms, DEM error, atmospheric delay error in the master image and the slave image are obtained. Subsequently, the nonlinear-subsidence components at PS points are extracted. By integrating analysis of ground deformation direction, reference datum, floor deformation positiveness and negativeness, the surface subsidence distribution situation in time and space of Yancheng city area is revealed.

Landslide is a typical geological disaster that has adverse effect on lives and properties, generating both direct and indirect economic losses in mountainous regions every year. Comparing to other geological disasters, landslides are considerably smaller in scale and more dispersed. The characteristics of landslide render detection and identification of landslides challenging. In this paper, object-based image analysis is used to detect landslide sites using remote sensing images. Firstly, multi-scale image segmentation was performed on the 0.61-meter Quickbird (QB) image of the study area and over tens of spatial, spectral, shape and texture features were extracted based on the segmented image objects. Secondly, 11 optimized features for landslides classification was selected using genetic algorithm (GA), which gives the best fitness value for landslides classification. Thirdly, in-situ landslides observation results were used as typical cases and cased-based-reasoning (CBR) classification was applied on all segmented image objects, from large scale to small scale. Finally, classification accuracy was evaluated over the whole study area. In conclusion, CBR method is able to detect landslides successfully using high resolution images. The CBR method proposed in this paper could achieve better classification accuracy than traditional supervised classification.

Land subsidence is a main kind of urban geological disasters, and is significantly serious in Beijing, which is induced by over pumping of groundwater continuously. It is becoming a negative effect on the sustainable economic development in plain areas. In consideration of a series of damages caused by land subsidence, risk assessment and zoning are very important for risk management. In this paper, we establish a hazard assessment model of land subsidence in Beijing using the AHP-Fuzzy method. The evaluation method is based on Remote Sensing and GIS technology. Remote sensing technology was used to retrieve the parameters of land subsidence from ASAR data. The AHP-Fuzzy assessment model was analyzed by taking a GIS-based modeling approach. Finally, a case study was carried out in Miyun-Huairou-Shunyi area of Beijing. As a result, the risk index of each study area was extracted by means of the AHP-Fuzzy method. Then the risk level of land subsidence was analyzed using the dimensional analytical method. It indicates that the risk of land subsidence in Beijing is inevitable. This result is useful for land subsidence disaster prevention and reduction.

Landslide is one of the major natural hazards. It is difficult not only to get the integrated and accurate landslide datum but also to monitor and predict the landslide. This paper presents a case study on the use of terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) for monitoring landslides in Jingyang, Shanxi, China. The TLS points cloud obtained in the study area is processed by existing software, and the experimental results show that TLS is an effective way in monitoring of landslides.

The Ms8.0 Wenchuan earthquake occurred on May 12, 2008 in Wenchuan County, Sichuan Province, China. The devastating event caused a significant surface rupture and deformation in a large geographical area. This study intends to investigate the co-seismic surface deformations due to the main shock by integrating observations from interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) and global positioning system (GPS). The InSAR measurements in an area of more than 83,000 km² are extracted from 46 SAR images that were acquired along 6 adjacent ascending orbits by the ALOS L-band PALSAR sensor. The three-dimensional displacements measured at 16 GPS stations are used to validate and calibrate the InSAR measurements by a least squares fitting, and thus removing the unwanted components due to atmospheric delay, orbital uncertainty and topographic bias. The preliminary results show that such an integrated method is useful for mapping the co-seismic surface deformation.

Public safety and public service is a particularly challenging task. The questions of how to use the limited resources efficiently, how to improve the Government's emergency rapid response and ability of risk resistance, and how to provide a more efficient emergency service for the public, have increasingly become the focus to strengthen urban management. Emergency Response Management System is a highly efficient and powerful command system dealing with natural and social disasters, by using all aspects of the force being gathered in a short period of time, sudden events can be handled efficiently, and further development of the incident can be controlled. In this paper, based on the analysis of development status of the emergency management system at home and abroad, and the key technologies of the emergency management system based on GNSS, research and development on emergency command system based on GNSS has been done. Meanwhile, test in Sichuan earthquake has also been carried out. Practice in Sichuan province earthquake relief work has proved that the emergency management command system based on GNSS can play the advantage function and exert the maximum potential, and can play the role of "lifeline" in the critical moment.

CORS/GMS integration can be used to monitor displacement of surface deformation in geological disasters at the mm accuracy level. In order to detect the distinct geological disaster-related displacement deformation automatically and extract the temporal and spatial characteristics in the process of deformation, an algorithm DDExM (Deformation Detection & Exaction Method) for deformation parameter estimation is presented in this paper. The algorithm DDExM includes four steps: outlier detection, adaptive threshold classification, deformation evaluation, and deformation parameters auto-detection. The hypothesis and test, and threshold classification tools are used, based on Kalman filter, to realize the auto-detection of uniform deformation parameters applicable to multi-scale accuracy demand from decimeter to millimeter level. Experimental data from both the slope at Tiansan stone pit and the Guangdong Continuously Operating Reference Stations (GDCORS) based geological disaster dynamic monitoring are used to evaluate the performance of the DDExM. The DDExM leads to the application of CORS/GMS integration based geological disasters dynamic monitoring in provincial region automatically and continually with high temporal and spatial resolution.

Personal digital assistant (PDA) with built-in GPS chip begins to be used for city management and emergency response management nowadays. The intelligent terminal can be used for event recording, multimedia (photo, audio, and video) capturing, wireless communication, GPS positioning and navigation. In the near future, PDA would take place of the vehicle GPS monitoring terminal to provide more functions and convenient. This article organizes the PDA of the same team for emergency response event into an integrated network through wireless communication so that each terminal can see each other on the map, including the vehicle GPS monitoring terminals. All of the terminals should send its GPS position and collected information to the emergency response center (ERC) through GPRS with a customized protocol. Then the center would create the socket connection to push the neighbors' location and common or special information to the others in the team according to the terminal's requirement and its authorities, and the leader or commander could send commands and messages to all of the underling members also. The GNSS based positioning and communication network organizes the dispersive emergency response personnel handheld with PDA and vehicles equipped with vehicle GPS monitoring terminal into an organic and cooperative network, each member in the network can see where its colleagues are, so as to seek for the help or support and exchange information in real time without calling which avoids exposure to the tracked objects. The Compass-1 satellite positioning and communication terminal is also used for personnel and vehicle positioning and message reporting. Altay is selected as the demonstration area. The prototype emergency management system is established for the local public security bureau and well validates the terminals and network function.

A 'fused' method may not be suitable for reducing the dimensionality of data and a band/feature selection method needs to be used for selecting an optimal subset of original data bands. This study examined the efficiency of GA in band selection for remote sensing classification. A GA-based algorithm for band selection was designed deliberately in which a Bhattacharyya distance index that indicates separability between classes of interest is used as fitness function. A binary string chromosome is designed in which each gene location has a value of 1 representing a feature being included or 0 representing a band being not included. The algorithm was implemented in MATLAB programming environment, and a band selection task for lithologic classification in the Chocolate Mountain area (California) was used to test the proposed algorithm. The proposed feature selection algorithm can be useful in multi-source remote sensing data preprocessing, especially in hyperspectral dimensionality reduction.

Spatial variability, a major feature of soils, was generally influenced by various factors, relative studies on which laid solid foundations for precision agriculture. In this investigation, method of geostatistics combined with GIS was used to analyze the spatial variability characteristics of soil available nitrogen (SAN), soil available phosphorus (SAP) and soil available potassium (SAK) and their influencing factors in Shuangliu county Sichuan province, China. The results showed that, SAP and SAK were normally distributed through naturally logarithmic transformation. Semivariogram analysis revealed that SAN and SAK were highly spatial correlated, while SAP moderately spatial correlated, and the spatially dependent ranges of SAN, SAK and SAP contents were 21590m, 76903m and 23300m, respectively. Through ordinary Kriging interpolation, SAN, SAP and SAK presented different varying tendencies in the study area. SSR test indicated that SAN was significantly different depending on different soil types; SAP was significantly different depending on terrain conditions and soil parental materials; SAK was strongly affected by soil parental materials. The fertilizer application rate at the regions with high soil available N, P and K contents was obviously higher than that with low soil available nutrient contents.

This paper presents a virtual reference station method and its application. Details of how to generate GPS virtual phase observation are discussed in depth. The developed algorithms are successfully applied to the independent development network digital land investigation system. Experiments are carried out to investigate the system's performance whose results show that the algorithms have good availability and stability. The resulted accuracy of the VRS/RTK positioning was found to be within ±3.3cm in the horizontal component and ±7.9cm in the vertical component, which meets the requirements of precise digital land investigation.

PROSAIL model is a coupler of PROSPECT leaf optical properties and SAIL canopy reflectance models. Its usage in leaf area index inversion could help avoid the shortages of the experience model. To identify the feasibility of leaf area index (LAI) inversion and the stability of PROSAIL model used in different scales and types of remote sensing data, this paper retrieves LAI of winter wheat in Beijing based on MODIS and ASTER by using the method of PROSAIL model inversion. Firstly, to determine the input parameters of the PROSAIL model, the sensitivity of the five parameters was analyzed. These parameters include chlorophyll a+b concentration, water depth, leaf mesophyll structure parameter, leaf area index, and mean leaf inclination angle. Secondly, the model reproduced the spectral reflectance of the winter wheat, using the determined parameters. Then, inversion was performed to retrieve leaf area index from MODIS and ASTER, and the simulated LAI was validated with field measurements. Because of the distinct scale difference between MODIS and field measurements, ASTER was used to upscale the field measurements by aggregating area-weighted of higher-resolution LAI to acquire LAI of corresponding lower-resolution. The results indicated that there was a high correlation between leaf area index inverted by PROSAIL and actual measurements with a reasonable spatial distribution. Furthermore, it is reliable to use PROSAIL model in remote sensing data with different scales.

The digital earth concept has aroused strong repercussions and been arousing researches boom both at home and abroad once it is proposed. Many digital earth prototype systems have been researched and distributed in worldwide, and the Google Earth is more typical. The booming development of digital earth's research and its prototype's development bring about G/S mode timely, a novel spatial information distributing access, and organization software architecture mode. Based on native GML spatial database system and Google Earth, with G/S mode as its architecture, and combination with GML/KML compressive transport and transformation, this paper proposed and designed the software architecture of GGEarth spatial data service application system, the research content and key implementation technologies were given. This system provides functions of data presentation, query, update and spatial analysis, which uses native GML spatial database (and GML, KML documents) as the standard data center, and the client based on Google Earth COM API as the front-end. This system can be applied in fields of digital city, digital tourism and traditional Web GIS. The authors developed the GGEarth experimental system and ran it with the data of '5.12' Wenchuan earthquake timing and the model data of digital Jiuzhaigou virtual tourism. Some running screenshots are also given.

The travertine in Huanglong has lasted for thousands of decades on account of the karst geologic effect. In recent years, the travertine came to be dried up, blacken, sanded, which seriously affected the aesthetic characteristic. We find that there are no perfecting monitoring systems and timing data by collecting and anglicizing Monitoring data. We choose grey model which requires less timing data and higher predictive results. The travertine development is predicted using the Ph factor. The whole Huanglong predictive result is based on kriging of spatial statistical analysis. We plot the travertine development to three types, which include excessively eroded, weakly eroded and packed. The predictive result shows that the travertine stage is a dynamic balance and a decline recombinant phase.

One novel composite kernel based support vector machine (SVM), which is called DOCKSVM (Data Oriented Composite Kernel based Support Vector Machine) is proposed in the paper. SVM have been proved good potential in various studies, and tried to application for pattern classification problems such as text categorization, image classification, objects detection etc. Recently, more and more researches show that SVM is promising in remote sensing image classification. Unlike traditional SVM method, DOCKSVM could integrate the bio-geophysical character into final classification through the composite kernels, which lead to the accuracy improvement of classification results. Firstly method of DOCKSVM is described in detail, then the novel method according to information entropy of training data to evaluate the weighted value of kernels is proposed, finally, preliminary results of application to remote sensing image classification is given which show that it's good potential tool for remote sensing image classification.

Land surface temperature (LST) is a key variable in considerable scientific disciplines and applications, especially for earth observation fields. The goal of this paper is to investigate and validate the application of a split-window algorithm, combining with the estimation of water vapor content in atmosphere, for inversing LST over northwestern China using Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data. In comparison with the MODIS LST product (as a standard), the retrieved LST shows a good agreement with the standard: the retrieval method's LST values of max, min and mean are 304.21 K, 285.09 K and 296.69 K respectively, the LST prodcut's LST values of max, min and mean are 304.54 K, 285.43 K and 295.80 K respectively. Therefore the differences between the retrieval method's LST values of max, min and mean with the LST prodcut's are only 0.33K, 0.34K and 0.89K, which indicates that the LST retrieval method has a believable accuracy, with the mean error of 0.89 K and the RMSE value of 0.91K.

Potential application of remote sensing in hydrology is one of the hot spots in the distributed hydrological model research. The remote sensing technology can be applied to obtain the spatial distribution and dynamics of hydrological phenomena which is not generally possible based on traditional data. In this paper, a fully distributed large scale hydrological modeling application is considered in the semi-arid area of the River Tarim basin in central Asia (area of more than 1.20x10⁵ km²). The model has been built based on the hydrological modeling software MIKE-SHE, which makes combined use of ground station data and multi-source and multi-temporal remote sensing data. Input and output data of spatially and temporally detailed variable model have been obtained by remote sensing data processing and geographical* spatial analysis for many useful hydrologic variables. These variables include digital elevations, land uses, soil types, precipitation intensities, evapotranspiration depths, snow cover heights and areas and leaf area index information. Through the case study application, insights have been obtained in the advantage of the potential usage of the remote sensing technology and products to support the hydrological process modeling of large scale river basins in developing countries where traditional station based data is very limited. The technology developed and the experience built in this study can be exported for applications in other analogical regions.

To study the cause of frequent drought and rainy-flood disasters in Sichuan province in recent years, a method based on remote sensing (RS), geographic information system (GIS) and global positioning system (GPS) is presented to establish land use/cover change (LUCC) database of Sichuan province. Firstly, LUCC was interpreted interactively with the China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite (CBERS-02) images in 2005, in the light of the database from Landsat-Thematic Mapper (TM) in 2000. Secondly, the interpreted result was validated in the field with GPS hand-held receiver and the database was updated subsequently. Thirdly, LUCC was extracted from the interpreted database with GIS software. The result reveals that the achievement of "grain for green" project was very little, and more farmland? were being occupied; the cities were overspreading at the same time. Therefore, the eco-environment of Sichuan province became worse. Some decisions were provided to improve the eco-environment of Sichuan province at last.

3D building reconstruction from airborne LiDAR point cloud is an active research topic in recent years. This paper presents a new algorithm based on invariable moment and proposes a new approach to use of minimum circum rectangle which aims to alleviate the deficiencies existed in invariable moment based scheme. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is less error prone and more efficient.

A national emergency spatial data sharing platform approach is a useful and a practical way to promote the discovering and integration of various data sources from different agencies. In this paper, an emergency spatial data sharing architecture used to facilitate resource discovery in the emergency management is presented. At routine time without disasters, the metadata can be shared between organizations so that the appropriate data to be used can easily be discovered. Also, in the event of emergency, this platform can be used to execute the data production plan scheduled by specialists to collect original data from different agencies according to the government's command, so that data can be distributed to the headquarters. On the basis of the introduction of the remote sensing data application in the earthquake, this paper also addresses the data resources (original remote sensing data, metadata, and data product) in the platform, as well as three core issues, data order management, metadata management and data distribution.

The illegal use of lands has come to impose a serious threat to land resources protection and land use plan implementation in China. Land use patrolling has long been proven to be an effective means for detection, investigation and prevention of illegal land use. However, land use patrolling performed in the traditional way is laborious and cumbersome. Central and regional government authorities are both seeking high-technology solution to enhance this job. In an effort to satisfy such requirements, we have designed and implemented an integrated system of mobile GIS, D-GPS and wireless Internet to assist land use patrolling and investigation. Details of this system are presented in this paper, including those of the system architecture, the field work-assisting subsystem, the Internet-based D-GPS subsystem ... etc. The main finding is that such technology is indispensable for land use patrolling and similar tasks. It can dramatically promote the patrolling or field work efficiency and tightly connect field and office staff to better perform the mission. Problems encountered in building the system are also discussed.

Debris-flow is one of the major geological hazards in southwest China, which are a global threat and happen and results in thousands deaths and injuries and billions of dollars in damages globally. Automatic multi-temporal DEM coregistration for detecting terrain changes is an attractive but inherent very difficult research topic. Many methods have been proposed in recent years, but all of them can only deal with DEM with limited percentage of terrain changes. However, in landslide and debris-flow areas, the rate of terrain changes is very high. To solve such a problem, a new method for detecting terrain changes using local invariant patches is proposed in this paper. According to the character of the debris-flow activities, the peak and ridge are rarely affected. From where some invariant patches can be extracted associated by the feature extraction method. After co-registration these invariant patches, a coarse matching can be reached. Therefore, two DEM can be compared after applying this coarse matching. With an appropriate threshold, most of terrain changes can be eliminated, and then a fine matching can be anticipated reasonable. The accuracy terrain changes will be derived. The new method can estimate the terrain changes quantificationally and automatically, and verifies by a real application. The experimental results illustrate the proposed method is of robust, accuracy, and timeefficiency.

High-precision and real-time remote sensing imaging system is an important part of remote sensing development. Holography is a method of wave front record and recovery which was presented by Dennis Gabor. As a new kind of holography techniques, Optical scanning holography (OSH) and remote sensing imaging are intended to be combined together and applied in acquisition and interference measurement of remote sensing. The key principles and applicability of OSH are studied and the mathematic relation between Fresnel Zone Plate number, numerical aperture and object distance was deduced, which are proved to be feasible for OSH to apply in large scale remote sensing. At last, a new three-dimensional reflected OSH remote sensing imaging system is designed with the combination of scanning technique to record hologram patterns of large scale remote sensing scenes. This scheme is helpful for expanding OSH technique to remote sensing in future.

With resource management as the core, the grid technique is considered as the third generation of the internet technology. How to use the grid technology to maximize the mining and sharing of earthquake data for the 12 may 2008 Wenchuan earthquake is important. Given the fact that the traditional centralized standalone mode is not effective for the concurrent use of multi-source data after the earthquake, we use the spatial information grid technique to build a grid model for data mining and sharing purposes. We further discuss the issue for format conversion and the application of this data sharing model. We conclude that this model can help support scientific analysis and coordinate rescuing efforts.

3D object reconstruction from image sequences is an economic way to extract spatial information from observed scene. In a long period, people from remote sensing and photogrammetry fields interest the application of 3D reconstruction theory and technologies. However, for the application of 3D reconstruction in the field of photogrammetry, error estimation of the result must be fully demonstrated. In this paper, error propagation rules in 3D reconstruction process has deduced on the base of matrix analysis method, and a calculation method of covariance matrix is presented for estimate errors of elements of the reconstruction result, while the related factors' effects to the result are analyzed. In addition, experiments are introduced to demonstrate the error estimation for 3D reconstruction.

This paper proposes a novel dual-SAR detector based on the joint metric of interferogram's magnitude and phase for slow ground-moving targets. Motivated by the difference of backscattering properties between slow moving targets and stationary clutter in the SAR image, we devise a new metric for slow ground-moving target detection by combining the interferogram's magnitude and transformed phase. By using simulated data, we demonstrate that this detector can help detect slow moving vehicles within severe ground clutter. Compared to the traditional Displaced Phase Center Antenna (DPCA) and Along-track Interferometry (ATI), this detector performs better because of its higher stabilization, wider range of detection velocity, lower probability of false alarm and higher detection probability.

Rock-desertification is a typical environmental and ecological problem in Southwest China. As remote sensing is an important means of monitoring spatial variation of rock-desertification, a method is developed for measurement and information retrieval of rock-desertification from multi-spectral high-resolution remote sensing images. MNF transform is applied to 4-band IKONOS multi-spectral remotely sensed data to reduce the number of spectral dimensions to three. In the 3-demension endmembers are extracted and analyzed. It is found that various vegetations group into a line defined as "vegetation line", in which "dark vegetations", such as coniferous forest and broadleaf forest, continuously change to "bright vegetations", such as grasses. It is presumed that is caused by deferent proportion of shadow mixed in leaves or branches in various types of vegetation. Normalized distance between the endmember of rocks and the vegetation line is defined as Geometric Rock-desertification Index (GRI), which was used to scale rock-desertification. The case study with ground truth validation in Puding, Guizhou province showed successes and the advantages of this method.