Reconstructing Taiwan’s land cover changes between 1904 and 2015 from historical maps and satellite images

Yi Ying Chen*, Wei Huang, Wei Hong Wang, Jehn Yih Juang, Jing Shan Hong, Tomomichi Kato, Sebastiaan Luyssaert

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

    Abstract

    A new reconstruction of changes in Taiwan’s land cover and estimated uncertainty between 1904 and 2015 is presented. The reconstruction is made by integrating geographical information from historical maps and SPOT satellite images, to obtain spatially explicit land cover maps with a resolution of 500 × 500 m and distinguishes six land cover classes: forests, grasslands, agricultural land, inland water, built-up land, and bare soil. The temporal resolution is unbalanced being derived from four historical maps describing the land cover between 1904 and 1994 and five mosaic satellite images describing the land cover between 1995 and 2015. The uncertainty of the historical maps is quantified to show the aggregation error whereas the uncertainty of the satellite images is quantified as classification error. Since 1904, Taiwan, as a developing country, has gone through a not unusual sequence of population growth and subsequent urbanization, a decoupling of the demand for agricultural land from population growth, and a transition from shrinking in forest area to forest expansion. This new land cover reconstruction is expected to contribute to future revisions of global land cover reconstructions as well as to studies of (gross) land cover changes, the carbon budget, regional climate, urban heat islands, and air and water pollution at the national and sub-national level.

    Original languageEnglish
    Article number3643
    Pages (from-to)1-12
    Number of pages12
    JournalScientific Reports
    Volume9
    Issue number1
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 6 Mar 2019

    Funding

    After obtaining permission from the Academia Sinica Department of Taiwan History and Culture in Time and Space, the original/historical maps can be accessed through http://thcts.sinica.edu.tw; [email protected] and http://thcts.sinica.edu.tw/view.php. The SPOT images that were preprocessed for Taiwan, are not public available unless the research is supported by MOST (Ministry of Science and Technology). All nine reconstruction maps can be downloaded from https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1256484. The R-scripts used for analysing the land cover reconstruction and preparing the figures can be downloaded from http://rpubs.com/yiyingchen/. This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology, R.O.C. (MOST 106-2111-M-001-001-MY3). SL was funded through an Amsterdam Academic Alliance fellowship. J.J. was funded through Research Center for Future Earth at National Taiwan University (NTU-107L901004). The GIS environment, i.e., ArcMap, which was instrumental in this study, was provided by Academia Sinica. Y.C. would like to thank Debbie Nester for the English proofreading.

    FundersFunder number
    Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan106-2111-M-001-001-MY3
    Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología
    National Taiwan UniversityNTU-107L901004

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