Land cover changes in tropical rainforest climate zones play an important role in global climate change and the functioning of the Earth’s natural system. Existing research on the consistency of different land cover products has mainly focused on administrative divisions (continental or national scales). However, the ongoing production of large regional or global land cover products with higher resolutions requires us to have a better grasp of confusing land types and their geographical locations for different zoning (e.g., geographical zoning) in order to guide the optimization of strategies such as zoning and sample selection in automated land cover classification. Therefore, we selected the GlobeLand30-2010, GLC_FCS30-2015, and FROM_GLC2015 global land cover products with a 30-m resolution covering Indonesia, which has a tropical rainforest climate, as a case study, and then analyzed these products in terms of areal consistency, spatial consistency, and accuracy evaluation. The results revealed that (a) all three land cover products revealed that forest is the main land cover type in Indonesia. The area correlation coefficient of any two products is better than 0.89; (b) the areas that are completely consistent among the three products account for 58% of the total area of Indonesia, mainly distributed in the central and northern parts of Kalimantan and Papua, which are dominated by forest land types. The spatial consistency of the three products is low, however, due to the complex surface types and staggered distributions of grassland, shrub, cultivated land, artificial surface, and other land cover types in Java, eastern Sumatra, and the eastern, southern, and northwestern sections of Kalimantan, where the elevation is less than 200 m. Given these results, land cover producers should take heed of the classification accuracy of these areas; (c) the absolute accuracy evaluation demonstrated that the GLC_FCS30-2015 product has the highest overall accuracy (65.59%), followed by the overall accuracy of the GlobeLand30-2010 product (61.65%), while the FROM_GLC2015 exhibits the lowest overall accuracy (57.71%). The mapping accuracy of the three products is higher for forests and artificial surfaces. The cropland mapping accuracy of the GLC_FCS30-2015 product is higher than those of the other two products. The mapping accuracy of all products is low for grassland, shrubland, bareland, and wetland. The classification accuracy of these land cover types requires further improvement and cannot be used directly by land cover users when conducting relevant research in tropical rainforest climate zones, since the utilization of these products could lead to serious errors.

Rocky desertification is one of the most critical ecological and environmental problems in areas underlain by carbonate rocks globally. Land cover and land use in the region affects large-scale ecosystem processes on a global scale, and many Earth system models rely on accurate land cover information. Therefore, it is important to evaluate current global land cover products and to understand the differences between them, and the findings of these studies can provide guidance to different researchers when using or making land cover products. Whereas there are many studies on the assessment of coarser resolution land cover products, there are few studies on the assessment of higher resolution land cover products (10 m). In order to provide guidance for users of 10 m data, this paper uses the rock deserted southwest region of China as the experimental area. We analyzed the consistency and accuracy of the FROM-GLC, ESA WorldCover 10 and ESRI products using spatial pattern consistency, absolute accuracy assessment of three validation samples, and analyzed their intrinsic relationships among classification systems, classification methods, and validation samples. The results show that (1) the overall accuracy of the FROM-GLC product is the highest, ranging from 49.47 to 62.42%; followed by the overall accuracy of the ESA product, ranging from 45.13 to 64.50%; and the overall accuracy of the ESRI product is the lowest, between 39.03 and 61.94%. (2) The consistency between FROM-GLC and ESA is higher than the consistency between other products, with an area correlation coefficient of 0.94. Analysis of the spatial consistency of the three products shows that the proportion of perfectly consistent areas is low at 44.89%, mainly in areas with low surface heterogeneity and more homogeneous cover types. (3) Across the study area, the main land cover types such as forest and water bodies were the most consistent across the three product species, while the grassland, shrubland, and bareland were lower. All products showed high accuracy in homogeneous areas, with local accuracy varied in other areas, especially at high altitudes in the central and western regions. Therefore, land cover users cannot use these products directly when conducting relevant studies in rocky desertification areas, as their use may introduce serious errors.

Aquaculture plays an important role in providing food and reducing poverty but it affects environmental change and coastal ecosystems. Remote sensing is a technology that is helpful in the spatial-temporal dynamic monitoring of aquaculture, coastal management, and environmental monitoring. Most research focuses on inland and coastal areas, and little attention is paid to the extensive distribution of marine aquaculture. As an example, we use the freely available Landsat data of the developed marine aquaculture Liaoning Province of China and use the object-oriented automatic extraction method to analyze the spatial and temporal distribution information of marine aquaculture from 2000 to 2018. The accuracy evaluation from the randomly distributed sample points in high-resolution remote sensing images shows that the extraction accuracy for all of the five individual years of aquaculture area was higher than 82%. The results showed that (1) in the past 19 years, the area of marine aquaculture in Liaoning Province showed an increasing trend, which increased from 35.41 km² in 2000 to 201.83 km² in 2018, approximately 5.7 times increase in total area, but the growth rate decreased slightly due to government policy and the environmental quality of the sea area. (2) The centroid of offshore aquaculture in Liaoning Province shows a migration pattern to the northeast, in general, extending from the Dalian Bay sea area to the eastern sea area of the Dalian Chengshantou National Nature Reserve of Coastal Landform in the northeastern direction, and the migration distance reached 48.78 km. Moreover, the migration distance between 2005 and 2010 was the largest of all of the periods, reaching 35.43 km. The new marine aquaculture areas are mainly concentrated in the eastern direction of Xiaoyao Bay, the Changshan Islands, and Guanglu Island in Changhai County. (3) The landscape pattern of marine aquaculture in Liaoning Province is split, large-scale aquaculture and small-scale aquaculture are symbiotic, and landscape ecological activities are active. For local managers, this study can provide valuable supporting data for the assessment of marine aquaculture yield in this region, comprehensive control and management of the marine environment, and stability of the marine ecosystem. For other countries or regions, this work provides a great reference value for monitoring the dynamic spatial distribution of marine aquaculture.

The ecological and natural conditions in drought regions are harsh. Water shortages and land desertification are prominent features of these regions. The land cover in these regions has a large impact on global climate change, as well as on ecological protection and construction. To make rational and sustainable use of land resources, it is crucial to quickly grasp the accuracy and spatial distribution differences of multi-source remote sensing land cover products in drought regions. Therefore, taking northwestern China as the study area, in this study, the accuracy and spatial pattern distribution differences of three high-resolution (10 m) land cover products, namely, the Finer Resolution Observation and Monitoring of Global Land Cover (FROM-GLC), European Space Agency (ESA), and Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) products, were compared and analyzed via area composition similarity, spatial pattern consistency, and absolute accuracy assessment for three validation samples. The results show that the FROM-GLC product had the highest overall accuracy, ranging from 53.81% to 73.45%. The ESRI product had the lowest overall accuracy, ranging from 35.90% to 64.16%. The spatial consistencies of the three products were low, accounting for 46.26% of the total area, and they were mostly distributed in a single area (mainly bare land and forest). The low accuracy for grassland, bare land, shrubland, and other vegetation types was the primary reason for the large differences between the three products. Future research should focus on improving the mapping accuracy for these vegetation types. Accuracies for water and cropland of the three products were consistent, and, thus, the FROM-GLC, ESA, and ESRI products can be used as auxiliary data in research related to water resources and cropland resources in drought regions.

Offshore marine aquaculture can not only provide a large amount of high-quality food for humans, but also effectively relieve the pressure on land space. However, it is difficult for traditional statistical data to reflect changes in spatial dynamics in marine aquaculture. It is also difficult to effectively manage marine space development given the current status of spatial planning regarding land–sea integration. This study used multiphase satellite remote sensing images of Shandong Province together with an automatic extraction algorithm for aquaculture to obtain spatial distribution data of marine aquaculture (surface of seawater visible by remote sensing, types of rafts, and cage aquaculture). GIS spatial overlay analysis technology was used to superimpose marine functional zoning (2010–2020) data for comparative analysis to evaluate implementation effectiveness and existing problems in marine functional zoning. Results showed that the critical time regarding substantial change in marine aquaculture area was around 2010, concurrent with the implementation of the current round of marine functional areas. The aquaculture area in the agricultural and fishery planning area increased from 228.33 km² in 2010 to 344.6 km² in 2018, and the overall proportion of aquaculture increased from 65.53% to 70.48%. This indicated that marine function planning can exert a guiding influence. The port area and protection area were found to be other major areas for the expansion of marine aquaculture. We also used field investigations in uncovering the phenomenon of the combined marine functions of marine aquaculture and tourism. On this basis, the role of spatial information technology in marine spatial planning was analyzed, which revealed the importance of coordinated integration of land–sea space for effective control of marine development.

Information, especially spatial distribution data, related to coastal raft aquaculture is critical to the sustainable development of marine resources and environmental protection. Commercial high spatial resolution satellite imagery can accurately locate raft aquaculture. However, this type of analysis using this expensive imagery requires a large number of images. In contrast, medium resolution satellite imagery, such as Landsat 8 images, are available at no cost, cover large areas with less data volume, and provide acceptable results. Therefore, we used Landsat 8 images to extract the presence of coastal raft aquaculture. Because the high chlorophyll concentration of coastal raft aquaculture areas cause the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and the edge features to be salient for the water background, we integrated these features into the proposed method. Three sites from north to south in Eastern China were used to validate the method and compare it with our former proposed method using only object-based visually salient NDVI (OBVS-NDVI) features. The new proposed method not only maintains the true positive results of OBVS-NDVI, but also eliminates most false negative results of OBVS-NDVI. Thus, the new proposed method has potential for use in rapid monitoring of coastal raft aquaculture on a large scale.