MACRO CLASSIFICATION OF VEGETATION IN CHINA WITH NOAA NDVIS/

Vegetation, which is considered as a sensitive indicator of eco-enviro nment changes, is becoming a hot topic in global studies. China is a l arge country with complex vegetation types. It is time-consuming and o f high cost to inventory countrywide vegetation by conventional method s. Recently developed remote sensing technology provides a new way for spatial vegetation classification. A lot of vegetation investigations in local areas with Landsat TM, MSS data have been done based on spec tral characteristics of ground covers. However, it is nearly impossibl e to carry out countrywide vegetation classification by TM data, becau se more than 300 scenes of cloud-free TM data will be required to cove r the whole country. Fortunately, low-cost meteorological satellite (e .g. NOAA) data with high time resolution can meet the demand of countr ywide macro study in spite of its low ground resolution. A number of s tudies have already been carried out to investigate the possibility of using meteorological satellite data to characterize and classify land cover and vegetation in large areas([1-4]).