Land Use Change Automatic Monitoring Using FPCR-ISODATA Method for a Rapid Urbanizing Region: Qingpu District in Shanghai City, China

Abstract

With the rapid development of China’s urbanization, land use automatic monitoring is imperative for the efficient allocation of resources and environmental conservation, especially in a metropolitan area with increased ecological-environmental stress as a result of large high-density population. Qingpu, a district of Shanghai, is located in Upper Huangpu Catchment for fresh water supply and an area of considerable ecological value, but it has been also experiencing development pressures from urban sprawl. An automatic procedure was proposed by using remotely sensed mass data to reveal the land use change in Qingpu District. In this procedure, historical remotely sensed data were first registered into the same spatial resolution and radioactive level. Then, data were subset via the boundary of study area for facilitating the following processing. Forward principal components rotation (FPCR) and iterative self-organizing data analysis techniques algorithm (FPCR-ISODATA) was developed to decorrelate or denoise data and divided the data into k groups (k>the number of land use types). After merging the same connoted groups and correcting misclassified units with promising accuracy, the series of land use map are created. The results further elaborated on the spatial-temporal change of agricultural land in Qingpu along with other land use changes over the past two decades. The conversions between land uses were shown as bare land appearing in a state of uncompleted development or transition. The results were consistent with reality and the method was accurate and practical.