Application of RS and GIS Techniques in the Study of Soil Mineralogy: The Case of Northwestern Part of Yunnan Province, China

This research integrated the remote sensing (RS) and Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques with soil Indices to quantify soil mineralogy distribution and the northwestern part of Yunnan province in China was taken as a case. Landsat ETM sense in 2000 was used to produce soil Indies maps of the study area based on the maximum likelihood classification method. These maps were then used to calculate by percent soil mineralogy distribution. The studied were also correlated with field, geophysical and geochemical studied. By using these techniques, locations of soil mineralogy distribution were identified. ERmapper and Arc/View software were used to manage and manipulate thematic data, to process satellite images and tabular data source. In term of statistic analysis 1214.4 km2 (18.17%) of land area had soil sand minerals, 1988.4 km2 (29.75%) had clay soil minerals and 856.2 km2 (12.18%) of the total land area was in an Iron oxides minerals. The study area, in general, is exposed to high distribution of soil mineralogy.