Advances in Remote Sensing

Volume 2, Issue 4 (December 2013)

ISSN Print: 2169-267X   ISSN Online: 2169-2688

Google-based Impact Factor: 1.5  Citations  

Comparison of a New Percent Tree Cover Dataset with Existing One and Categorical Land Cover Datasets in Eurasia

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DOI: 10.4236/ars.2013.24037    5,244 Downloads   7,916 Views  Citations

ABSTRACT

The global tree cover percentage is an important parameter used to understand the global environment. However, the available percent tree cover products on global or continental-scale are few, and efforts to quantitatively validate these maps have been limited. We produced a new percent tree cover dataset at 500 m resolution in 2008 for Eurasia using reference data interpreted from Google Earth. It is a part of percent tree cover (PTC) data in Global Mapping project. In this study, the dataset was compared with existing global percent tree cover dataset, MODIS Vegetation Continuous Fields, MOD44B. We assessed the agreement of these datasets with two existing global categorical land cover datasets and statistic data in Eurasia. The result showed that estimates of tree cover in our new map and MOD44B were relatively similar at randomly sampled sites. Our map and MOD44B agreed with either or both of land cover maps at 93% of sites and 91% of sites, respectively, for pixel blocks. However, we found that MOD44B disagreed with our map and categorical land cover datasets at about half of the sampled sites where the difference of tree cover percentage between our map and MOD44B was large, especially in the areas with significant differences (more than 50%). Disagreed areas were concentrated in forests of Russia and Indonesia, and in herbaceous dominated vegetation of UK and Ireland. We also found that both our map and MOD44B were somewhat different from the data reported by FRA 2010.

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T. Kobayashi and R. Tateishi, "Comparison of a New Percent Tree Cover Dataset with Existing One and Categorical Land Cover Datasets in Eurasia," Advances in Remote Sensing, Vol. 2 No. 4, 2013, pp. 345-357. doi: 10.4236/ars.2013.24037.

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