Analysis of regional economic development based on land use and land cover change information derived from Landsat imagery

The monitoring of economic activities is of great significance for understanding regional economic development level and policymaking. As the carrier of economic activities, land resource is an indispensable production factor of economic development, and economic growth leads to increased demand for land as well as changes in land utilization form. As an important means of earth observation, remote-sensing technology can obtain the information of land use and land cover change (LUCC) related to economic activities. This study proposes a method for analysing regional economic situations based on remote-sensing technology, from which LUCC information extraction, sensitivity factor selection, model construction and accuracy evaluation were implemented. This approach was validated with experiments in Zhoushan City, China. The results show that the economic statistical index is most sensitive to the construction land area, and the average correlation coefficient between the actual data and the predicted data is 0.949, and the average of mean relative error is 14.21%. Therefore, this paper suggests that LUCC could be utilised as an explanatory indicator for estimating economic development at the regional level, and the potential applications of remotely-sensed image in economic activity monitoring are worth pursuing.