The China land cover database with 1 km spatial resolution

a part of GLC2000

has been developed with the 10-day composite SPOT VGT data over a period of 01 January 2000 to 31 December 2000 and the multi-spectral data of the last decade of August 2000. The multi-spectral image of the last decade of August 2000 was then used since the NDVI datasets are not sensitivie to the area with poor vegetations in northwest China. Land-cover mapping for large area will face the problem that the study area landscape greatly varies with the climate

terrain and soil

and it is a common phenomenon that the different objects have the same spectral information or the same object has different spectral information. In order to resolve this problem

the whole territory of China had been stratified into eight relative homogenous bio-climatic strata and one specific Tibet region. The stratification was carried out based on the climate condition （ above 10℃ accumulated temperature and aridity）

and then all data pre-processing

classification

interpreting and labeling processes had been carried out in each stratum

respectively. This would be good for the accuracy of the result and process of the data. In order to remove cloud contamination and interpolate the missing data masked by cloud

the Harmonic Analysis of Time Series （ HANTS） was applied to pre-process the 36 layer of VGT S10 NDVI dataset

and the ancillary metric derived from temperature

precipitation and DEM has been developed with the Analytic Hierarchy Process （ AHP） algorithm to improve the discriminating ability of VGT metrics. With the assistance of Erdas ISODATA algorithm

the classification has been carried out

and 22 types of land cover had been labeled in the whole China according to the Land Cover Classification System developed by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization （FAO） in the framework of the AFRICOVER project. The accuracy assessment was complemented by comparing with the data derived from the product with the statistic data from Chinese Statistics Bureau.