Recently, the government has been developing "indicators of sustainable development" for monitoring environmental changes based on annual statistics. However, for land use and land cover changes, such statistics are rarely accurately updated. To explore the feasibility of using remote sensing to supplement the presentation of sustainable development indices, this study tried to use SPOT imageries to analyze the relationship between remote sensing-derived vegetation covers and township development statistics. Several suburban and agricultural townships in northern and central Taiwan were selected for study. Results show that both the vegetation cover ratio and mean NDVI derived from SPOT images were highly correlated to road density and population density statistics of townships. However, vegetation changes detected on the satellite images were not significantly correlated with the changes in statistics of township development.
