Successful biological monitoring depends on judicious classification. An attempt has been made to provide an overview of important characteristics of marsh wetland. Classification was used to describe ecosystems and land cover patterns. Different spatial resolution images show different landscape characteristics. Several classification images were used to map and monitor wetland ecosystems of Honghe National Nature Reserve (HNNR) at a plant community scale. HNNR is a typical inland wetland and fresh water ecosystem in the North Temperate Zone. SPOT-5 10 m × 10 m, 20 m × 20 m, and 30 m × 30 m images and Landsat -5 Thematic Mapper (TM) images were used to classify based on maximum likelihood classification (MLC) algorithms. In order to validate the precision of the classifications, this study used aerial photography classification maps as training samples because of their high accuracy. The accuracy of the derived classes was assessed with the discrete multivariate technique called KAPPA accuracy. The results indicate: (1) training samples are important to classification results. (2) Image classification accuracy is always affected by areal fraction and aggregation degree as well as by diversities and patch shape. (3) The core zone area is protected better than buffer zone and experimental zone wetland. The experimental zone degrades fast because of irrational development by humans.