Abstract:
Abstract: Human activities within the Nature Reserves are considered a threat to the endangered species. This study takes the land cover/land use as the representative of human activities within the Nabanhe National Nature Reserve. As optical remote sensing images are frequently contaminated by cloud and frog, which will restrict its practicality in monitoring human activities in Nabanhe National Nature Reserve, this study aimed to fuse the multi-resources of optical remote sensing images to build a high spatio-temporal resolution data (30 m daily surface reflectance) for the year 2000, 2004, 2010 and 2015 using the ESTARFM (Enhanced Spatial and Temporal Adaptive Reflectance Fusion Model). The fused data was assessed during the data fusing procedure, and in a correlation of greater than 0.8 (with P<0.01) with the reference image for each period of time. The fused data was then used to generate the time-series NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index), which would be used to differentiate each of the 5 land covers (namely natural forest, rubber trees, water, farmland and built-up area) to be classified. Previous to the extraction of the time-series features, denoising of the time-series NDVI was conducted using the double S-G (Savitzky-Golay) filter. 6 features were generated using the denoised NDVI time-series data, and used to classify the 5 land covers above. The Random Forest classifier was used during the classification, and the RF classifier was trained using the reference samples that were selected from high spatial resolution Google Earth images. The overall accuracies of the final classification results were greater than 86.88%, with Kappa values greater than 0.817?6 (the overall classification accuracies for the year 2000, 2004, 2010 and 2015 were 88.13%, 86.88%, 89.38% and 90.63% respectively, and the corresponding Kappa values were 0.834?0, 0.817?6, 0.853?3 and 0.871?1, respectively). This accuracy guaranteed the availability of the classification results in monitoring human activities in Nabanhe National Nature Reserve. The land cover/land use changing trend was analyzed based on the classification results for each period of time, of which the results were as follows: from 2000 to 2004, water area increased mainly due to the conversion of farmland and built-up area, which occupied 0.06% and 0.01% respectively of the entire area of the Nabanhe National Nature Reserve. Farmland area increased, and the increased area was mainly from natural forest and rubber trees. Built-up area increased, and the increased area was from natural forest and farmland. The area of the increased rubber trees is the largest, and the increased rubber trees occupied natural forest and farmland. The only decreased land cover/land use was the natural forest during this period of time. From 2004 to 2010, water areas increased mainly due to the conversion of natural forest and rubber trees, because there was a hydropower station built during this period of time. Increased farmland area was mainly from forest, while increased built-up area was mainly from farmland. Rubber area was increasing due to the conversion of forest, the area of which was decreasing constantly during this period of time. From 2010 to 2015, increased water occupied farmland and the forest was changed to farmland with the largest area (96.47% of all land converted to farmland was forest). Expanded built-up area was from rubber farmland (occupied 76.92% of all land changed to built-up). It was during this time that the farmland changed the most, it was 5.29% of the area of the Nabanhe National Nature Reserve. Obvious land use changing trend corresponding to terrain was found from 2000 to 2015. Built-up distribution changed less, but the corresponding area increased. The rubber was distributed in areas with slopes ranging from 0 to 36 degrees, and it was first expanded from 0 to 12 degrees, and then to 24 degrees and now is distributed to near 36 degrees. The expansion of rubber is pushing the rubber planting to the limit in the Nabanhe National Nature Reserve. Same changing trend was found to the farmland from 2000 to 2015. Both of these land covers are expanding to steeper terrain and larger areas in the Nabanhe National Nature Reserve. The method provided by this study may support the governmental departments in monitoring human activities within Nature Reserves.