Cultivated Land Information Extraction and Gradient Analysis for a North-South Transect in Northeast Asia between 2000 and 2010

Cultivated land resources are an important basis of regional sustainability; thus, it is important to determine the distribution of the cultivated land in the Northeast Asia trans-boundary area of China, Russia and Mongolia, which has a continuous geographic and ecological environment and an uneven population distribution. Extracting information about the cultivated land and determining the spatial and temporal distribution of its features in this large trans-boundary area is a challenge. In this study, we derived information about the cultivated land of the North-South Transect in Northeast Asia by Linear Spectral Mixing Model, using time series data with MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) in 2000 and 2010. The validation showed more than 98% pixels with a root mean square error less than 0.05. The overall accuracy and spatial consistency coefficients were 81.63% and 0.78 in 2000 and 72.81% and 0.75 in 2010, respectively. The transect analyses indicate the presence of a greater amount of cultivated land in the south and less in the north. China owns most of the cultivated land in the transect area, followed by Mongolia and then OPEN ACCESS Remote Sens. 2014, 6 11709 Russia. A gradient analysis revealed a decrease of 34.16% of the cultivated land between 2000 and 2010. The amount of cultivated land decreased 22.37%, 58.93%, and 64.73% in China, Russia, and Mongolia, respectively. An analysis shows that the amount of cultivated land is primarily influenced by the various land development and protection policies in the different counties in this trans-boundary area.