Long-Term Changes of Land Use and Land Cover in the Yangtze River Basin from 1990–2020 Landsat Data

Abstract

Economic development and climate change drive the land use and land cover (LULC) change globally. Annual robust maps of LULC are critical for studying climate change and land–climate interaction. However, the current existing methods for optimizing and expanding the publicly available China land cover data set (CLCD) are limited. In this article, 30-m annual LULC changes are obtained from 1990 to 2020 in the Yangtze River basin (YRB). The results show an overall accuracy rate of 82.66% and better performances on Geo-Wiki test samples when compared to similar products. Based on our 30-m annual LULC data set, the drastic LULC changes are found in YRB over a 30-year period, where impervious surface area more than tripled, cropland area decreased by 6.12%, and water area decreased by 6.09%. In addition, through the geographically and temporally weighted regression method, a fitting model with a goodness of fit of 0.91 well reveals that human activity plays a driving role in the LULC change of YRB.