Monitoring vegetation recovery at abandoned land

Petroleum exploration and production in the Yellow River Delta (YRD) can lead to human impacts on the unique YRD wetland ecosystems. There is a strong need for scientific information on long-term ecosystem response to disturbances in YRD and the factors that affect the spatial and temporal pattern of vegetation recovery. High spatial resolution remote sensing images have been successfully used to map the vegetation recovery. However, this type of imagery was not easily available for large areas until recently. In our paper, the absorption features of the tasseled cap transformation brightness (TCTB) derived from the 15 m fusion-ready Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) time series imagery were used to map the vegetation patch recovery at Gudong Oil Field. The detection accuracy of the quasi-circular vegetation patches ranged 28.57-100%. From 2001 to 2005, there were respectively 3, 7, 7, 6, 7, 4 and 10 newborn vegetation patches along Transect 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8. Results from our paper indicated that our approach could be a useful, efficient and economical for monitoring environmental conditions and vegetation recovery with the insufficient funds.