NDVI changes in China between 1989 and 1999 using change vector analysis based on time series data

Change vector analysis (CVA) and principal component analysis in NDVI time-trajectories space are powerful tools to analyze land-cover change. The magnitude of the change vector indicates amplitude of the change, while its direction indicates the nature of the change. CVA is applied to two remotely sensed indicators of land surface conditions, NDVI and spatial structure, in order to improve the capability to detect and categorize land-cover change. The magnitude and type of changes are calculated in China from 1989 to 1999. Through the research, the main conclusions are drawn as follows: 1) The changes of NDVI are quite different between eastern China and western China, and the change range in the east is bigger than that in the west. The trend in NDVI time series is smoothly increasing, the increases happen mostly in Taiwan, Fujian, Sichuan and Henan provinces and the decreases occur in Yunnan and Xinjiang. 2) The spatial structure index can indicate changes in the seasonal ecosystem dynamics for spatially heterogeneous landscapes. Most of spatial structure changes, which occurred in southern China, correlated with vegetation growth processes and strike of mountains.

Topographically derived subpixel-based change detection for monitoring changes over rugged terrain Himalayas using AWiFS data

Continuous and accurate monitoring of earth surface changes over rugged terrain Himalayas is important to manage natural resources and mitigate natural hazards.Conventional techniques generally focus on per-pixel based processing and overlook the sub-pixel variations occurring especially in case of low or moderate resolution remotely sensed data.However,the existing subpixel-based change detection(SCD)models are less effective to detect the mixed pixel information at its complexity level especially over rugged terrain regions.To overcome such issues,a topographically controlled SCD model has been proposed which is an improved version of widely used per-pixel based change vector analysis(CVA)and hence,named as a subpixel-based change vector analysis(SCVA).This study has been conducted over a part of the Western Himalayas using the advanced wide-field sensor(AWiFS)and Landsat-8 datasets.To check the effectiveness of the proposed SCVA,the cross-validation of the results has been done with the existing neural network-based SCD(NN-SCD)and per-pixel based models such as fuzzybasedCVA(FCVA)andpost-classification comparison(PCC).The results have shown that SCVA offered robust performance(85.6%-86.4%)as comparedtoNN-SCD(81.6%-82.4%),PCC(79.2%-80.4%),and FCVA(81.2%-83.6%).We concluded that SCVA helps in reducing the detection of spurious pixels and improve the efficacy of generating change maps.This study is beneficial for the accurate monitoring of glacier retreat and snow cover variability over rugged terrain regions using moderate resolution remotely sensed datasets.