Over the past 30 years

considerable parts of coastal tideland have been enclosed and reclaimed for agricultural land uses in Zhejing province. The purpose of this work was to evaluate whether the laboratory spectral data could be used to estimate the reclamation levels of saline soils. The northern region of Shangyu City in Zhejiang Province as a study area was divided into four sub zones with different historical years of reclamation. Soil samples were collected from field at approximate 1 kilometer intervals using GPS. Soil physic chemical properties analyzed in laboratory showed that saline soils had low organic matter

high electrical conductivity and sand content

and some soil properties changed with reclamation years. These changing trends of soil chemical and physical properties can be indicated by laboratory reflectance spectra of soil samples. The Person correlation analysis showed that there existed good relationships between nine absorption bands and selected soil properties. Stepwise Discrimination Analysis （SDA） was applied to estimate the reclamation levels of saline soil. The results showed that saline soil with different reclamation years could be classified with an overall accuracy of 86 8% for 68 original grouped cases and 89 3% for 28 cases not involved in SDA according to the Fisher’s discriminant functions. The study suggests that remote sensing should be potentially useful and effective tool to estimate saline soil reclamation

by comparison to the time consumed conventional field investigation.