Remote Sensing Based Land Use Change and Landscape Pattern Analysis in Taicang County, China

Based on Landsat TM images, the land use change and landscape pattern of Taicang County, Jiangsu Province in 1995 to 2008, have been investigated using the supervised classification and Fragstats. Images processing including study area resizing, radiometric correction, geometric correction, and supervised classification have been conducted. The land use categories in Taicang were classified into four types, including built land, vegetation land with high water, vegetation land with low water, and water body. The overall accuracies of the supervised classification are 97.58% and 89.35% for 2001 and 2008, respectively. Using eight landscape metrics proposed by the FRAGSTATS, i.e. NP, PD, LPI, TE, LSI, PAFRAC, SHDI, and SIDI, the landscape pattern of Taicang County have been analyzed in detail.