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 ofthe 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.