Research on Ecological Environment Change of Middle and Western Inner-Mongolia Region Using RS and GIS

The ecosystem of semi-arid region, the neighboring zone of agriculture and grazing area in Inner Mongolia is very sensitive and fragile. It is urgently demanded to assess the status of regional ecological environment quality degradation and o find out potential environmental degradation area.In this paper the vegetation, soil brightness, moisture and heat indices are extracted and evaluated from multi-band and multi-time TM and MSS remote sensing data to describe ecosystem status. An ecological environment quality evaluation model is built from these indices, climate data (air temperature, precipitation, evaporation and relative moisture) and other geographical auxiliary information (geomorphologic types, terrain elevation and land use information, etc.), on the support of GIS. The ecological environment change during 2 decades (from 1976,1987 to 1996)of middle and western Inner-Mongolia region is evaluated using this model. The ecological environment quality degradation of this region is analyzed from the aspects of average regional ecological environment quality index change, the area change of each ecological environment quality index, and from sample band analysis. Finally, this paper also analyzes the change of climate factors and the effect of these changes on ecological environment quality change quantitatively.Through correlation analysis of ecological environment quality change and climate factor change, this paper concludes that the climate changes are the major reason that leads to ecological environment degradation. By calculation of the correlation between ecological environment quality change and change of precipitation, evaporation and moisture, which is the combination of the former two factors, this paper puts forward that the major climate factor that affects ecological environment changes in semi-arid region is moisture. During the 20 years, the effect of human behavior increases a lot. Meanwhile this research also proves that the methodology used in this paper is effective.