Study of environmental change detection using remote sensing and GIS application: A case study of Northern Shaanxi Province China

Abstract

This research focuses on the environmental change indicators in the northern part of Shaanxi Province, China. Remote sensing and GIS software were used to classify Landsat TM of 1987 and Landsat ETM+ of 2002 imagery into five land use and land cover (LULC) classes. Supervised classification and change detection techniques were adopted in this research and used, respectively, to retrieve its class boundary. The results showed that 7,867.3 Km 2 (28.4%) of land had high environmental change, 9,474.1 Km 2 (34.2%) had moder