tailieunhanh - WETLAND AND WATER RESOURCE MODELING AND ASSESSMENT: A Watershed Perspective - Chapter 15

15 Development of Geospatial Ecological Indicators in Jiangxi Province, China Peng Guo and Xiaoling Chen INTRODUCTION Comprehensive evaluation of ecological environments is necessary for environmental sustainability and management planning, which can provide quantitative documents as scientific guides for informed decision making. The existence of several environmental impact assessment (EIA) methods makes it difficult to make on an appropriate choice (Sankoh 1996). Remote sensing, being a very useful observational tool, has been integrated with GIS (geographic information system) to monitor and evaluate environmental conditions (Shen et al. 2004, Wang et al. 2002, 2004). In these studies, Landsat TM, ETM+ and NOAA/AVHRR (National Oceanic and. | 15 Development of Geospatial Ecological Indicators in Jiangxi Province China Peng Guo and Xiaoling Chen INTRODUCTION Comprehensive evaluation of ecological environments is necessary for environmental sustainability and management planning which can provide quantitative documents as scientific guides for informed decision making. The existence of several environmental impact assessment EIA methods makes it difficult to make on an appropriate choice Sankoh 1996 . Remote sensing being a very useful observational tool has been integrated with GIS geographic information system to monitor and evaluate environmental conditions Shen et al. 2004 Wang et al. 2002 2004 . In these studies Landsat TM ETM and NOAA AVHRR National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer images were used to obtain the vegetation cover status derived from NDVI Normalized Distance Vegetative Index . In this paper we demonstrate the potential of the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer MODIS for monitoring ecological and environmental conditions. MODIS is flown on two NASA satellites Terra morning pass 1999-present and Aqua afternoon pass 2002-present . MODIS data are collected continuously and are available for public use. Poyang Lake located in the middle reach of the Yangtze River and the subtropical wet monsoon zone is the largest freshwater lake in China. The area of Poyang Lake basin is X 104 km2 9 of the Yangtze River basin and 97 of the basin is located in Jiangxi Province. Over many years the total area of forest and lake land cover has been reduced due to human activities such as increasing population which has resulted in the deterioration of the ecological environment in the Poyang Lake basin. The area of soil and water being damaged by erosion in Jiangxi Province is X 104 km2 Guan 2001 . This process of erosion has been seriously destroying the quality of the ecological environment and impacting the sustainable development .