Publications

Zhong, B; Yang, AX; Jue, KS; Wu, JJ (2021). Long Time Series High-Quality and High-Consistency Land Cover Mapping Based on Machine Learning Method at Heihe River Basin. REMOTE SENSING, 13(8), 1596.

Abstract
Long time series of land cover changes (LCCs) are critical in the analysis of long-term climate, environmental, and ecological changes. Although several moderate to fine resolution global land cover datasets have been publicly released and they show strong consistency at the global scale, they have large deviations at the regional scale; furthermore, high-quality land cover datasets from before 2000 are not available and the classification consistency among different datasets is not very good. Thus, long time series of land cover datasets with high quality and consistency are in great demand but they are still unavailable, even at the regional scale. The Landsat series of satellite imagery composed of eight successive satellites can be traced back to 1972 and it is, therefore, possible to produce a long time series land cover dataset. In addition, the newly available satellite data have the capability to construct time series satellite images and a time series analysis method such as LCMM can be employed for making high-quality land cover datasets. Therefore, by taking the advantages of the two categories of satellite data, we proposed a new time series land cover mapping method based on machine learning and it, thereafter, is applied to Heihe River Basin (HRB) for verification purposes. Firstly, the high-quality land cover datasets at HRB from 2011-2015, which were retrieved using the LCMM method, are used for quickly and accurately making training samples. Secondly, a strategy for transferring the training samples after 2011 to earlier years is established. Thirdly, the random forest model is employed to train the selected yearly samples and a land cover map for every year is subsequently made. Finally, comprehensive analysis and validation are carried out for evaluation. In this study, a long time series land cover dataset including 1986, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015 is finally made and an average precision of about 90% is achieved. It is the longest time series land cover map with 30 m resolution at HRB and the dataset has good time continuity and stability.

DOI:
10.3390/rs13081596

ISSN: