The use of SRTM data for visualizing the Mid-Upper Reaches of Yangtze River area and dynamic monitoring of land cover changes

The Mid-Upper Reach section of the Yangtze River in China has the most spectacular landscape in the world, where the Three Gorges is famed for its beautiful scenery and one of the largest hydrological dam projects in the world. In the past, the destroy of natural ecological environment, such as excessive deforestation, resulted in heavy soil erosion and unprecedented floods in 1998. In 1999, however, the central government of China has launched a national-wide project for developing the western part of China. Returning farmland and deforested land to forest and grassland is the main theme of the project. The SRTM data could provide high precision topographic data for visualizing the Mid- and Upper Reaches of the Yangtze River and dynamic monitoring of land-cover changes. We intend to use SRTM data by integrating them with other source remote sensing data for visualization. By using a software package "World Construction Set", a 3-D digital "Yangtze River" could be constructed for visualization. The land-cover changes due to the Three Gorge hydrological engineering, deforestation and ecological reconstruction can then be analyzed according to multi-source remotely sensed data.