As the composition of China-Germany cooperation project“Land use and Sustainable Development （SILUP）”

Jiangning county of Nanjing

in the South of China

was selected as a test area. The SPOT-2 and SPOT-4 remotely sensed images were used for deriving such thematic information as landuse

water bodies

roads and settlements and their thematic mapping. In this paper

some comprehensive methods and techniques of extracting the information from SPOT data were described

specially a improved method of land use/land cover classification by using SPOT images and ancillary data. In the land use/land cover classification

the feature sets containing the SPOT original band

and a digital elevation model were tested using MLC clustering. Incorporation of slop data generated from DEM was found to be able to improve the classification accuracy of land use. Further land cover discrimination was improved when using fusion images of PAN and XI. The study also put forward techniques of screen display editing to get the thematic maps. Some thematic maps were generated and their accuracy was assessed and discussed. The results showed that much good thematic information can be derived from SPOT images by using the methods and techniques introduced in this paper

and some extracted information can be used for drawing thematic maps in a scale of 1∶50000.