Desertification research based on digital Earth

Digital Earth is the trend for geospatial research, it will help effective and efficient sharing of spatial data all over the world. In this paper, the authors through analyzing the developing background and trend of information society, think that with the development of global spatial information infrastructure, the technologies needed for digital Earth such as computational science, satellite imagery, and metadata etc. have matured. So it is the time to do some experimental application research based on digital Earth. Desertification is a key reason to influence environment change, it is a spatial related globalization problem. Now with the development of remote sensing, geographic information system, and network technology, people have with the probability to deal with mass desertification data through Internet, and the direction of it is to connect with digital Earth. So the author selected Horqin desertification area as an experimental region with the technology support of them and got an good result. According to the dynamic research, for the people's activity, the desertification in the area developed fast from 1950s to 1970s, and more fast than before from 1970s to 1990s. If detracted the people's bad factor to the area or by the help of them, the ecological environment would be recovered again. The research result is gotten by commuter rather than go to investigation in the place, so the method will have an important meaning for the general improvement and the ecological environment recovering of Horqin sandy area, it also has a good role for making decision by the support of digital Earth technology for government.