Analysis of land cover change and its driving forces in a desert oasis landscape of Xinjiang, northwest China

Abstract

The combined effects of drought, warming and the changes in land cover have caused severe land degradation for several decades in the extremely arid desert oases of southern Xinjiang, northwest China. Land cover classifications of Landsat images in 1990, 2000 and 2008 were performed based on the multistage supervised classification scheme using the maximum likelihood classifier integrated with conventional vegetation and soil indexes, which improved overall accuracies by 4-5% compared to the standard classification method. Based on the detection of changes in land cover during 1990-2008 using remote sensing (RS) and a geographic information system (GIS), it can be found that the oasis significantly (+35%) increased, while the are.