Validation of land cover products is a fundamental task prior to data applications. Current validation schemes and methods are, however, suited only for assessing classification accuracy and disregard the reliability of land cover products. The reliability evaluation of land cover products should be undertaken to provide reliable land cover information. In addition, the lack of high-quality ref...

This document details the structural definition, development process, and functional flow of the MODIS Land-Cover Product. The Land Cover and Land-Cover Change Parameters were proposed by the MODIS Land Team, with Team Member Alan Strahler leading the effort. The Land Cover Parameter is a 1-km product provided on a quarterly basis beginning about one year following the acquisition of a global d...

We present here a new approach to the development of a global land cover map. We combined three existing global land cover maps (MOD12, GLC2000, and UMD) based on the principle that the majority view prevails and validated the resulting map by using information collected as part of the Degree Confluence Project (DCP). We used field survey information gathered by DCP volunteers from 4211 worldwi...

Remote Sensing as a direct adjunct to field, recently playing an important role in the study and assess the natural resource in any part of the world. Anthropogenic changes in land use and land cover and land use are often assumed to be identical, they are rather quite different. Land cover may be defined as the biophysical earth surface, while land use is often shaped by human, socio-economic ...

Changes in land use/land cover are a major driver of biodiversity change in the Mediterranean region. Understanding how animal populations respond to these landscape changes often requires using landscape mosaics as the unit of investigation, but few previous studies have measured both response and explanatory variables at the land mosaic level. Here, we used a "whole-landscape" approach to ass...

Cities are experiencing rapid population growth and consequently extensive urbanization. Land-use/land-cover change is one of the important elements worldwide, which significantly affect the environment. This study aims to describe the emergence of urban heat and cool islands as a result of changes in land-use/land-cover. Land surface temperature over a 32-year period in Isfahan city, Iran was ...

Earth’s land cover has been extensively transformed over time due to both human activities and natural causes. Previous global studies have focused on developing spatial and temporal patterns of dominant human land-use activities (e.g., cropland, pastureland, urban land, wood harvest). Process-based modeling studies adopt different strategies to estimate the changes in land cover by using these...

The main goal of this study is to develop a general framework for building a hybrid land-cover map by the synergistic combination of a number of land-cover classifications with different legends and spatial resolutions. The proposed approach assesses class-specific accuracies of datasets and establishes affinity between thematic legends using a common land-cover language such as the UN Land-Cov...