Due to the large amount of Codonopsis pilosula planted in Weiyuan county,and the arable land area,the local medicinal materials office uses a large amount of manpower,financial resources and material resources to estimate its area every year. In order to extract the information of local Chinese medicinal materials more quickly and simply,we try to apply remote sensing technology to the extraction of Chinese medicinal materials. This paper will use Weiyuan county of Gansu province as the research area,and use the domestic ZY-3 Satellite multi-spectral remote sensing image as the data source to find out the spectral characteristics of the party's participation in other remote sensing images. The visual interpretation method was used to extract the planting area of the C. pilosula in Weiyuan county. The estimated value of the planting area of C. pilosula using satellite remote sensing technology was 75 965 mu( 1 mu≈667 m2),which was basically consistent with the field survey data of the local medicinal materials office. After the accuracy verification,it was found that the precision of C. pilosula planted by visual interpretation was more than 70%. It is concluded that the satellite remote sensing technology can be used to extract the information of C. pilosula and it can provide the relevant information of the planting area of Chinese medicinal materials quickly and accurately.
Keywords: Codonopsis pilosula; Weiyuan county; ZY-31; area estimate.