MONITORING LAND COVER AND LANDSCAPE PATTERN CHANGE ALONG HIGHWAY CORRIDOR USING MULTI-TEMPORAL REMOTELY SENSED DATA

摘要

Monitoring ecological environment change along highway is an important topic of regional sustainable development, but it hasn't been paid enough attention so far. Remote Sensing images are the most important data sources for landscape ecology, which is evidenced by lots of studies in different fields. In this paper, multi-temporal medium-resolution remotely sensed Landsat TM data are used as the data source of extracting highway corridor areas, classifying land cover, deriving landscape pattern and structure information, and some typical landscape indices are used to analyze the change of land cover and landscape pattern change caused by highway construction. Taking Xuzhou city as a case, and two major highway sites are used to further study, including the third ring road around urban area and the express highway around the suburban areas. Land cover before and after highway construction along the buffering zones of highway is classified at first, and then different landscape indices are computed to describe the landscape pattern change quantitatively. The relationship between highway construction with land cover change and landscape pattern change is investigated based on those indices, and some effective patch-based and edge-based indices are selected to describe the relationship and process. Based on those analyses, it is concluded that medium resolution remote sensing images can be used to monitor the land cover and landscape pattern change and related environmental impacts along road corridors caused by highway construction, although their spatial resolution is too coarse to extract fine information about land cover and landscape pattern.