A comparison study on landscape characteristics based on the aggregation of remotely sensed data with multiple spatial resolutions

A comparison study on land cover classification and landscape characteristics, using NOAA/AVHRR digital images of 3 different spatial resolutions (1 km pixel, 4 km pixel, 8 km pixel), is performed in this paper on the vegetation in temperate grassland region in the west of the Northeast China Transect (NECT). Particular emphasis is being put on a comparison of the boundary consistency and spatial difference of the classification result from using remotely sensed data at 3 different spatial resolutions, and the difference of the landscape pattern revealed by the images. This paper establishes a basis for the further study at different scales on the landscape change process. The study shows: (1) the macro spatial pattern of the region land cover revealed by images of 3 different spatial resolutions is consistent, but the boundary of the land cover type and the shape and the number of patches of each type differs greatly. (2) It is shown by the comparison of four indexes (fractal dimension, fragmentation, diversity, and dominance) that the structure of landscape changes greatly with the decrease of spatial resolution as revealed by images. And the fractal dimension of each cover type shows the most obvious variations, which indicates the change of spatial resolution contributes most to the patch complexity