Land use/land cover (LULC) characterizaitoin with MODIS time series data in the Amu River Basin

Improved and up-to-date land use/land cover (LULC) data sets are needed over intensively land use/cover change area in the Amur River Basin (ARB) to support science and policy applications focused on understanding of the role and response of the LULC to environmental change issues. The main goal of this study was to map LULC in the Amur River Basin using MODIS 250 m Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Land Surface Water Index (LSWI) time series data in 2001 and 2007. A combination of unsupervised ISODATA and hierarchical decision tree classification were performed on 12-month time-series of MODIS NDVI data over the study region. The MODIS land cover result of Northeast China was evaluated using existing land use/cover data, and the rest part was evaluated by LULC information derived from LANDSAT-TM. MODIS 250m NDVI, LSWI and reflectance datasets were found to have sufficient spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions to detect unique multitemporal signatures of the major land cover types over the region. The overall classification accuracy was 0.81 and the kappa coefficient is 0.64. In conclusion, this method has been used successively for LULC change monitoring in the year 2001 and 2007. The result indicate that MODIS 250 NDVI time series data can derive relatively accurate LULC information for hydrological and climate modeling.