Rural ecosystem planning in high-resolution remote sensing and GIS environment: Case study of beautiful countryside planning of Wuyi County, China

Beautiful Countryside Planning has been proposed in Zhejiang Province, China. This paper takes Wuyi County as study area. During the planning stage, high resolution remote sensing and GIS techniques are utilized for the retrieval and analysis of ecosystem and environment information, which is divided into 4 steps. In the first step, vegetation information is retrieved from Landsat TM/ETM+ and ASTER images; meanwhile, the land surface temperature is calculated using the imagery. In the second step, all these information are imported to GIS. In the third step, each type of information is considered as one of the factors affecting the ecosystem and environment, and statistics and spatial overlay are applied using GIS techniques to evaluate the current status of the study area. In the final step, the results of indices calculation are compared with the standards and objectives of Beautiful Countryside, and the planning program is generated accordingly.