Remote sensing began with the use of aerial photography and is acknowledged as a valuable tool for viewing, analyzing, characterizing, and making decisions about our environment. The Grand Canal of China is the longest ancient canal in the world and recently approved as the Key National Relics-preservation Unit. In our work multi-source and multi-temporal remote sensing data, including the aerial photographs taken half a century ago and the recently acquired SP0T5 multispectral images and the RADARSAT-1 images are collected. Through a comparative and complementary analysis of the data sets, some findings are given. The general characteristics of the canal course and the canal cities are also described, which provides important information for the making plans of the Grand Canal preservation.
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