Land cover change in Ningbo and its surrounding area of Zhejiang Province,1987～2000

INTRODUCTION Land use and land cover change (LUCC) has become an increasingly important aspect of global environmental change and is a multi-disciplinary subject where geophysicist, bio-physicists and socio-economists meet one another. Land cover is an expression of human activities and, as such, changes with changes in land use and management (Louisa and Antonio, 2001), and land cover change could be regarded as change in biotic diversity, actual and potential productivity, soil quality…

Land cover change in Ningbo and its surrounding area of Zhejiang Province, 1987～2000

Ningbo and its surrounding area is the forefront in the rapid economic development in the Yangtse delta, and the main production area for food supplies, cotton, edible oil and hemp; and at the same time, is the main area for wetland protection in Zhejiang Province. Our objectives were to quantify land cover change in Ningbo and its surrounding area from 1987 to 2000 and to analyze the causative factors of the change. Using 30-m resolution Landsat TM/ETM data and maximum likelihood classifica- tion method, we classified the study area into six land cover types: forest, agriculture, urban, freshwater, seawater and bottomland. The research results showed that significant changes in land cover occurred in the study area, and that agriculture and urban land cover change dominated most of the land cover change and were main causes for the changes of other types with human activities, such as urbanization, industrialization, etc. being the main factor while it was not very obvious whether climatic conditions have any role in the land cover changes. Agriculture, bottomland and other nature dominated land cover types are undergoing signifi- cant changes due to industrialization and urbanization, which threaten the stabilization of the environment. The study conclusion called for finding reasonable ways to solve the problems between land cover change and land use.