National land resources remote sensing laboratory is a dominant component of Institute of Remote Sensing Applications, based on the laboratory of renewable resources and ecological environment. It is developing synchronically with the process of Chinese Academy of Sciences knowledge innovation program. In a long term, with the supports of remote sensing and GIS techniques, this laboratory has successfully finished a series of researches to investigate, monitor, analyze and estimate the spatial and temporal characters of land resources and environments. These research results provide a scientific data sustentation for national continuable development strategic decision and management, and established the stable base of resources environment modern process researches.

National land resources remote sensing laboratory is constructed by a professional group, which gathered with professors, associate professors and graduate students etc. The research directions of our group located on nationwide land resources remote sensing monitoring and analyzing, included land use, land cover, soil erosion, ecological environment change, land degradation, urban expand and so on.

Our group has completed a lot of research work on resources and environment remote sensing application field, developed and consummated the system technical methods of land resources and ecological environment remote sensing application researches. We have advanced and unique capacity for gathering, processing and analyzing the spatial-temporal information of land resources, water and soil loss, ecological environment and other eco-environment domains in national region. During our research process, we have accumulated a mass of data information, and made a lot of achievements.

We take the lead in building:

l　　  Landset TM remote sensing image database.

This database includes about 16,000 scenes multi-temporal remote sensing data since 1970s, and can realize nationwide multiple coverage. Corrected image database, built with normalized false-color composite system, can cover 32 provinces, 2,367 countries in China.

l　　  Multi-stages (middle of 1980s, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005……) nationwide land use and change database at 1:100,000 scale.

Land use data adopt three levels classification, which includes 6 major classes, 25 second classes and 8 third classes. All data are converted into ARC/info vector data type and 100m grid data type. We do update these data periodically in few years.

l　　  Nationwide soil erosion database at 1:100,000 scale.

　 Soil erosion data adopt two levels classification split into 3~6 intensity levels, which includes water erosion, wind erosion, freeze-thaw erosion, gravity erosion, engineering erosion, and water-wind interlaced erosion. All data are converted into ARC/info vector data type and 100m grid data type.

l　　　  Multi-stages (1980s, 2005……) nationwide land cover and change database at 1:250,000 scale.

　 Like as land use database, all data are converted into ARC/info vector data type and 100m grid data type, and will be updated periodically.

l　　  Nationwide ecological environment background database in 500m grid resolution.

This database includes 9 theme data layers (altitude, gradient, exposure, temperature, accumulated temperature, and coefficient of humidity, aridity, and NDVI) and nationwide ecological environment background aggregative index.  

l　　  Nationwide urban growth procedure database.

　 This database covers all municipality cities, provincial capitals, autonomous region capitals and special economic zone, and reflects the urban growth procedure since 1970s in full. Database includes remote sensing images, ARC/info vector data, and area data.

l　　  Nationwide 1:250,000 scale DEM database included altitude and gradient.

l　　  Nationwide land use / land cover scene photo database.

　 Photo database includes more than 9,000 photos, covering 31 municipality cities, provinces and autonomous regions, excepted Taiwan province.

All above achievements have accordant data standard and technical parameters, and can directly implement spatial overlay analysis of multi sources, multi temporal, and multi theme data. A mass of research results, keeping ahead international and internal research, obtained many advance of science and technology awards given by nation, CAS, provinces and departments. 

Based on the research achievements, 6 monographs and more than 140 research papers were published. National land resources remote sensing department has brought up more than 20 masters and doctors for resource environment remote sensing application research.