Study On Methods And Application Of Grassland Desertification Monitoring By Remote Sensing

A new approach is developed in this paper to detect the dynamic of the grassland desertification at Naiman county based on remote sensing data. It is discovered that the correlation between MSAVI(Modified Soil Adjusted Vegetation Index) and vegetation coverage is higher than that between NDVI(Normalized Differential Vegetation Index) and grassland coverage when the land cover is low. So MSAVI can be used as the main index of grassland desertification degree. In order to evaluate the precision of the result, different methods such as supervised classification, unsupervised classification and visual interpretation on image are tried respectively. The result indicates that the precision of MSAVI Method is 79.6%, higher than that of supervised classification and unsupervised classification. Such precision is able to meet the requirement of monitoring on grassland desertification at large scale based remote sensing data.All the study is based on TM images on 11th August 1987 and 9th August 2001.The grassland desertification in the middle part of Naiman of Inner Mongolia was taken as a detailed case study to discuss the discipline and driving forces of the dynamic of the grassland desertification during two periods.