Mapping Land Cover Patterns of Gunma Prefecture, Japan, by Using Remote Sensing

A set of land-cover pattern maps for the Gunma Prefecture was produced to help understand and assess the ecological implications of regional spatial patterns. Covering a total area of approximately 6,360 square kilometers, about 77 percent of this area can be regarded as “vegetation cover”. The land cover map was derived from the supervised classification process with the combined use of TM, SPOT and aerial images. Six aggregated classes are forest, agriculture, grass, bare land, urban, water, with class proportion of 73.91%, 8.57%, 3.77%, 3.08%, 10.22%, 0.45% respectively. A series of spatial filters to the land-cover maps is applied to derive new maps of pattern indicators. Five pattern indices were mapped: forest connectivity, forest area density, land-cover connectivity, land-cover diversity, and landscape pattern types. Mainly according to the topographical conditions in the direction of from east to west, Gunma prefecture was divided into three subregions: urban, suburban and mountainous area. Patches-patch size method was utilized to determinate the pattern scale, i.e., kernel size, and grain size. Results show that grain size of 0.0147km and kernel size of 16*16,16*16,12*12 pixel for urban, suburban and mountainous regions, respectively, were suitable parameters for pattern mapping.