The land use and land cover change database and its relative studies in China

In the mid-1990s, we established the national operative dynamic information serving systems on natural resources and environment. During building the land-use/land-cover change (LUCC) database for the mid-1990s, 520 scenes of remotely sensed images of Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) were interpreted into land-use/land-cover categories at scale of 1:100,000 under overall digital software environment after being geo-referenced and ortho-rectified. The vector map of land-use/land-cover in China at the scale of 1:100,000 was recently converted into a 1-km raster database that captures all of the high-resolution land-use information by calculating area percentage for each kind of land use category within every cell. Being designed as an operative dynamic information serving system, monitoring the change in land-use/land-cover at national level was executed. We have completed the updating of LUCC database by comparing the TM data in the mid-1990s with new data sources received during 1999–2000 and 1989–1990. The LUCC database has supported greatly the national LUCC research program in China and some relative studies are incompletely reviewed in this paper.