Spatial and Quantitative Comparison of Satellite-Derived Land Cover Products over China

AbstractBecause land cover plays an important role in global climate change studies, assessing the agreement among different land cover products is critical. Significant discrepancies have been reported among satellite-derived land cover products, especially at the regional scale. Different classification schemes are a key obstacle to the comparison of products and are considered the main factor behind the disagreement among the different products. Using a feature-based overlap metric, we investigated the degree of spatial agreement and quantified the overall and class-specific agreement among the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectoradiometer (MODIS), Global Land Cover 2000 (GLC2000), and the National Land Cover/Use Data-sets (NLCD) products, and the author assessed the products by ground reference data at the regional scale over China. The areas with a low degree of agreement mostly occurred in heterogeneous terrain and transition zones, while the areas with a high degree of agreement occurred in major pl...