Abstract
This paper aims to reveal the features of the spatial distribution of land use/land cover in China based on the statistical analysis on a set of county-level databases including area estimates from the 1-km resolution NOAA/AVHRR-derived monthly NDVI composite data as well as the population census data. The initial analysis based on 2, 374 county-level land use/land cover data disclose the mechanism of land type converting, and show the distributional features of China's land use/land cover are very different throughout the six administrative regions. After that, the author divides the six administrative regions into the four land cover types based on the results derived from canonical discriminant analysis, especially examines the regional distributions on cropland and forestland in terms of area coverage and area per capita at the county-level. As an integrated conclusion, it was demonstrated that China's spatial features of land use/land cover at the county level can be drawn based on the NOAA/AVHRR data for wide area monitoring, and the results of canonical discriminant analysis is meaningful for spatial classification of land use/land cover. On the other hand, it was also shown that the NOAA/AVHRR data are not suitable to monitor the land cover changes in a small area because of the restriction of low spatial resolution.
