Mapping and monitoring principal crop land cover/ use changes in Mongolia using remote sensing

Mongolia began to cultivate virgin lands at the end of the 1950, 1976 and 2009 years. From 1990s, Mongolia entered a period of transition from a central-based planned economy to a market economy. Increasing the level of self-sufficiency in the production of strategic crops (e.g., wheat, barley, potato and vegetables) is one of the objectives of Mongolian policy makers. To achieve the objective is, maximum likelihood supervised classification and post-classification change detection techniques were applied to Landsat TM and ETM images(with path/row 132/25-27, 133/25, and 131/26-27) acquired in 1989 and 2000, respectively, to map cropland cover changes in the principal cropland area (Tov and Selenge aimag) of Mongolia. A supervised classification was carried out on the six reflective bands (bands 1-5 and band 7) for the images individually with the aid of ground truth data.