Remote sensing monitoring on the effects of the grain to green in qiandongnan prefecture, China

Qiandongnan Prefecture (QDN) is located in southeast of Guizhou province, China. There are 2900 rivers in this region and it plays a vital role in the soil and water conservation of the Yangtze River upstream watershed. It is also one of the regions of richest biodiversity in China. This paper studied the effects of the Grain to Green in Qiandongnan Prefecture based on remote sensing monitoring. The data sources are four historical land use maps which were extracted from Landsat TM /+ETM and Landsat8 remote sensing images, covered the study area spanned the temporal frames of 1993, 1999, 2009 and 2013. The results show that the whole forest was decreasing and the farmland was increasing after the implementation of the Grain to Green Project, but the forest in the north and northwest, where the key area was for the Grain to Green Project, was increasing and the farmland there is decreasing. This means that forests were turning back to farmland while the implementation of reforestation.