Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
6963027 Environmental Modelling & Software 2015 9 Pages PDF
Abstract
Effective conservation planning relies on the accurate identification of anthropogenic land cover. However, accessing localized information can be difficult or impossible in developing countries. Additionally, global medium-resolution land use land cover datasets may be insufficient for conservation planning purposes at the scale of a country or smaller. We thus introduce a new tool, GE Grids, to bridge this gap. This tool creates an interactive user-specified binary grid laid over Google Earth's high-resolution imagery. Using GE Grids, we manually identified anthropogenic land conversion across East Africa and compared this against available land cover datasets. Nearly 30% of East Africa is converted to anthropogenic land cover. The two highest-resolution comparative datasets have the greatest agreement with our own at the regional extent, despite having as low as 44% agreement at the country level. We achieved 83% consistency among users. GE Grids is intended to complement existing remote sensing datasets at local scales.
Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering Computer Science Software
Authors
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