Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
10114116 Remote Sensing of Environment 2005 13 Pages PDF
Abstract
A ca. 1980 national-scale land-cover classification based on aerial photo interpretation was combined with 2000 AVHRR satellite imagery to derive land cover and land-cover change information for forest, urban, and agriculture categories over a seven-state region in the U.S. To derive useful land-cover change data using a heterogeneous dataset and to validate our results, we a) stratified the classification using predefined ecoregions, b) developed statistical relationships by ecoregion between land-cover proportions derived from the 1980 national-level classification and aggregate statistical data that were available in time series for all regions in the U.S., c) classified multi-temporal AVHRR data using a process that constrained the results to the estimated proportions of land covers in ecoregions within a multi-objective land allocation (MOLA) procedure, d) interpreted land cover from a sample of aerial photographs from 2000, following the protocols used to produce the 1980 classification for use in accuracy assessment of land cover and land-cover change data, and e) compared land cover and land-cover change results for the MOLA method with an unsupervised classification alone. Overall accuracies for the 2000 MOLA and unsupervised land-cover classifications were 85% and 82%, respectively. On average, the 1980-2000 land-cover change RMSEs were one order of magnitude lower using the MOLA method compared with those based on the unsupervised data.
Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering Earth and Planetary Sciences Computers in Earth Sciences
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