Higher Resolution Global Land Cover Mapping

Abstract

Global land cover data is fundamental for many application areas,especially for climate change and global sustainability studies.Several global land cover data products at 1 km or 300 m spatial resolution have arisen from different national or international initiatives.With a focus on mapping different vegetation types worldwide,they were developed with coarse-resolution remote sensing data and using different mapping approaches.The inconsistencies and uncertainty of these data products have been studied and limited their utilization in global environmental change studies and earth system simulation.It is therefore necessary to develop new global land cover products with higher spatial resolution and standardized mapping approaches.China has started to develop 30m global land cover data set and this project is briefly introduced in this paper.