TITLE:
Comparison of a New Percent Tree Cover Dataset with Existing One and Categorical Land Cover Datasets in Eurasia
AUTHORS:
Toshiyuki Kobayashi, Ryutaro Tateishi
KEYWORDS:
Vegetation; Mapping; Estimation; MODIS; Forestry
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Remote Sensing,
Vol.2 No.4,
December
26,
2013
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.