1. Introduction

Land-use and land-cover change (LUCC) plays a pivotal role in global environmental change and significantly affects Earth-atmosphere interactions, ecosystem services, climate change, biogeochemical cycles, and biodiversity. Understanding their dynamic processes and impacts is crucial to better use and manage precious land resources and to realize sustainable development. Global mountain regions cover one fourth of the Earth’s land surface and are most vulnerable and sensitive to environmental change and global warming, which provide unique opportunities to monitor and study environmental change processes and consequences. Meanwhile, remote sensing provides spatially continuous observations on the Earth’s surface from space. The integration with geographic information systems (GIS) is an effective approach to characterize, map, and monitor land-use and land-cover change and dynamic processes. With the advancement in remote sensing, GIS, and computer technology, it is now possible to monitor, map, and assess land cover and land-cover changes at multiple spatial and temporal scales with more spatially and temporally explicit ways.