Remote Sensing of Cotton Plantation Areas Monitoring in Delta Oasis of Ugan-Kucha River, Xinjiang

The delta oasis of Ugan-Kuqa River is one of the main cotton production zones in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Accurately monitoring and assessment of the area and spatial distribution of cotton plantation is of great importance to the optimization and sustainable development of cotton industry in Xinjiang. In this paper, the cotton plantation area was extracted and assessed with the combination of Landsat TM image and in situ surveyed data. The results showed that the most of cotton plantation ware distributed on the southwest and south of the newly reclaimed land along with Tarim River, while only part of cotton plantation was distributed sporadically in the north of Tarim River. The remotely sensed area of cotton plantation was 155210 hm2, which was close to the statistical data (147493 hm2). Overall accuracy for remote sensing crop plantation was 94.77%, and the specific accuracy of Kuqa, Shaya, and Xinha was 92.16%, 97.83%, and 93.19%, respectively. Our study indicates that remote sensing is an effective method for cotton plantation area estimation with the in situ surveyed data at regional scale.