“…In this study, the ability of each spectral variable to distinguish six land cover types, including water bodies, bare lands, carex, phragmites or reed, poplar and willow, was quantified using three widely used measures of class separability, including JM distance [13,14,[16][17][18][19][20], transformed divergence [1,17,33,34] and B-distance [35]. The class separability measures were used to rank the spectral variables that were input one by one into the set of the spectral variables used for classifying the six land cover types.…”