Agricultural resources assessment and monitoring with remote sensing and spatial information systems in Shanxi Province, China

As a provincial centre for remote sensing in Shanxi, it has developed its integrated remote sensing and GIS system for agricultural resource assessment and monitoring in the Province with a very complex loess highland landscape, segmented land parcels and multi-diversity crops. The structure of the system was designed such that it can be readily updated to integrate the remote sensing (TM and CB-1) and other types of agricultural information needed for timely agricultural monitoring and assessment. In addition to introduce the structure and application of the system, this paper will focus on the innovative methods implemented in the system for improving interpretation accuracy and minimizing the information loss due to resampling process involved in fusing multiple images and the resolution alteration. The key issues we address here include multi-scale processes. The systems can readily handle problem in various scales such as province, city and county scales; (2) Determination of 100m × 100m as the optimum re-sampling resolution for fusion and integration of various data for the application in the province scale. The resolution has been shown adequate both for the analysis and for the capacity of the facility available at the centre; and (3) Integration of GIS and RS to assist the information extraction, classification and identification of features.