Monitoring land cover changes with remote sensing in transboundary area of Southwest China

The research of land use and land cover changes is a core and focal point for the study on the global changes. Land cover changes are also the leading factor of the regional ecological environment changes. This paper assessed the land use and land cover changes in the transboundary area of Yunnan province in China from 1970's to 2004 by applying remote sensing data including MSS in the 1970s, TM in the 1980s and TM in 2004. The maximum likelihood of supervised classification was used to extract LUCC information from remote sensing image. The total precision is 82.5% and Kappa index is 0.7436. The analysis result of remote sensing showed that most of the surface features are forest and naked rock, and the third is waters. High vegetation cover, serious stony desertification phenomenon, low farmland and scattered grassland are the main characteristic of this area. The driven factors in the transboundary area of Yunnan province in China are analyzed. Conclusions can be drawn as follows: (1) Natural factor (2) Human activity factor (3) Scientific and Technological factor (4) Governmental policy factor (5) Market driven factor (6) Increasing population factor.