The classification accuracy of land cover has been considered as one of the major issues to estimate pollution loads generated from diffuse landuse patterns in a watershed. This research aimed to assess the effects of the acquisition methods and sampling size of training reference data on the classification accuracy of land cover using an imagery acquired by optical sensor(OPS) on JERS-1. Two kinds of data acquisition methods were considered to prepare training data. The first was to assign a certain land cover type to a specific pixel based on the researchers subjective discriminating capacity about current land use and the second was attributed to an aerial photograph incorporated with digital maps with GIS. Three different sizes of samples, 0.3%, 0.5%, and 1.0% of all pixels, were applied to examine the consistency of the classified land cover with the training data of corresponding pixels. Maximum likelihood scheme was applied to classify the land use patterns of JERS-1 imagery. Classification run applying an aerial photograph achieved 18 % higher consistency with the training data than the run applying the researchers subjective discriminating capacity. Regarding the sample size, it was proposed that the size of training area should be selected at least over 1% of all of the pixels in the study area in order to obtain the accuracy with 95% for JERS-1 satellite imagery on a typical small-to-medium-size urbanized area.