Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 19
Short-Interval Monitoring of Land Use
and Land Cover Change Using a Time Series
of RADARSAT-2 Polarimetric SAR Images
Anthony Gar-On Yeh and Zhixin Qi
19.1
Introduction
With rapid growth in economy in the last two decades, cities in some rapidly
developing regions in China, such as the Pearl River Delta, have expanded consid-
erably. The demand for land for industrial and residential uses imposed increasing
pressure on the management of agricultural and environmental sensitive land.
Although a great deal of agricultural land was expropriated to meet the increasing
land demand for residence and business, insufficiency of land supply still restricted
industrial development in these regions. The insufficiency of land resource caused
land prices to soar. As a result, many illegal land uses emerged in some rapidly
developing places, such as urban fringes, in these regions. Due to the lack of effec-
tive monitoring tools, some illegal land uses have caused irreversible environmental
problems, such as loss of farmland, forest degradation, soil erosion, and adverse
effects on species diversity (Yeh and Li
1996
). Serious environmental deterioration
caused by urban sprawl poses a threat to healthy urban development. Short-interval,
such as monthly, land use and land cover (LULC) change information is important
for the government to control and prevent illegal land development at its early
stage. Furthermore, it is also important in analyzing and simulating urban land
development and assessing the ecological effect in different scales. Therefore, short-
interval monitoring of LULC change in these rapidly developing regions is much
needed.
Traditional field-based approaches are limited by their spatial coverage and
temporal frequency. Satellite remote sensing has been employed prominently in
LULC change monitoring because of its capability to observe land surface in
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