Land cover classification analysis about water and elevation in East Dongting wetland

Remote sensing has been an important mean of resource monitor, especially monitoring wetlands where researchers can hardly get to. This paper applied SPOT-5 image to classify the East Dongting Lake area into five cover types using the decision tree classification method. The five cover types were water, mudflats, bare ground, low-coverage marsh land and high-coverage marsh land. According to results of band analysis, this paper extracted the water by adding fourth band and first band, resulting that the water body boundaries extracted by band calculated using this method are highly consistent with water body in the image after SPOT-5 panchromatic and Multi-spectral bands fusion. Then a multilayer buffer was created based on waterbody through referring to the elevation value distribution histogram. we defined the levels range and divided the elevation into 6 levels. Finally, relationship between various cover types and elevation and relationship between various cover types and water buffers were analyzed, drawing them with water distance relationship.