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

• 作者: Ryutaro Tateishi Toshiyuki Kobayashi
• 来源期刊: 遥感技术进展(英文)
• 学科: 医学
• 关键词: VEGETATION MAPPING Estimation MODIS FORESTRY
• 年，卷（期）: ygjsjzyw_2013,（4）
• 页码范围: 345-357
• 页数: 13页
• 分类号: R73

摘要

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.