Land cover information is important for many applications like flood modeling, observation of agricultural

drought, climate change modeling, and monitoring of environmental changes including vegetation
phenology, flooding, fire occurrence, and monitoring of carbon emission due to deforestation and forest
degradation.
Typical land cover classes include, for example, forest, crops, grassland, water surfaces, or artificial cover.
Land cover interacts strongly with the water cycle and the climate system. The type of land cover
determines the behaviour of precipitation on the Earth. This includes the infiltration rate, runoff,
and evapotranspiration of water. The spatial distribution of different land cover types is therefore, a decisive
factor for water and climate models. In hydrology, a so-called curve number is used to predict runoff and
infiltration. The value of the curve number depends on the soil and land cover type. Land cover maps are
needed to determine the spatial distribution of different curve number values within an area.
Another example of using land cover information for disaster risk reduction is agricultural drought
monitoring. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) extracts a crop mask from land cover information
to calculate the Agricultural Stress Index for cropland. UN-SPIDER’s Regional Support Office in Iran, the
Iranian Space Agency, recommends a similar approach. Detailed step-by-step procedures on this
Recommended Practice is available on the UN-SPIDER Knowledge Portal.
How is land cover mapped from space?
Most global land cover maps are based on medium to high resolution optical and radar satellite imagery,
for example, AVHRR, MODIS, SPOT-Vegetation, and MERIS. More recently high-resolution optical
imagery, from the Sentinel missions, Landsat, SPOT-4/5, IRS LISS III and RapidEye, is used to generate
regional land cover maps.
When using a standard approach satellite imagery is obtained and the user chooses a type of analysis
method which is believed to be the most appropriate for the information they are trying to receive. As
mentioned above, pixel spectral reflectance/absorption is an often used method to classify different
Landover types in both semi- and/or automated processes. In some texts, these are often referred to as
supervised or unsupervised classification respectively. Semi-automated land cover mapping is often
dependent on the skill of the user and the number of samples used to train the software or program. On the
other hand, automated processes can result in errors in unique landscapes where specific features don’t
fall into the standard reflective pattern. However, pixel reflection is not the only way to map land cover from
space. An object-based approaches make use of more than just the spectral information of single pixels;
they take the relationship to neighbouring objects, the shape, homogeneity, size and colour of the object
into account. Multi-temporal approaches are used to separate very similar classes, for example, different
crop types, by looking at different plant growth patterns.
Multi-sensor fusion of optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data is applied to increase the number of
acquisitions within a phenological cycle and to improve the classification accuracy. The choice of the most
suitable classification algorithm depends on different factors like data availability or the number and type of
land cover classes.The drawback of having so many different classification algorithms in place is that
available land cover maps are often not comparable. The international remote sensing community
including GEO and GTOS has worked on the harmonization of global land cover products and
standardization of classification systems to improve interoperability of different land cover maps. The Land
Cover Classification System (latest version: LCML – LCCS v.3; ISO 19144-1) aims at providing a globally
applicable classification scheme. Progress is also made in the development of validation standards, for
example by the CEOS Cal/Val Working Group.
How can I access land cover maps?
For generic use, many land cover datasets are available for free. This includes global datasets based on
medium to coarse resolution satellite imagery, for example

 MODIS land cover products: years 2001-2012; 500m-5,600m resolution (link to the data)
 Land cover products from ESA's climate change initiative: years 1998-2012; 300m resolution (link to
the data)
 Global land cover by national mapping organisations - GLCNMO: years 2003-2008; resolution 500-
1,000m (link to the data)
 Global land cover GLC2000 by the European Commission's Joint Research Center (link to the data)
 ESA's Globcover map: year 2009; 300m resolution: year 2000; 1,000m resolution (link to the data)
With the GLC-SHARE map, FAO provides a global land cover map. Through harmonization and
standardization of classification systems, FAO has fused best available land cover maps for all regions to
produce this global product, which was released in October 2014. (link to the data)China has released in
summer 2014 the first global land cover map based on Landsat data at 30m resolution. (link to the data).
For many countries, national land cover maps are available based on high-resolution Landsat or SPOT-5
imagery. National land cover data are included in the UN-SPIDER database on data sources, which can
be filtered by countries (link to the data). For example, the Space and Upper Atmosphere Research
Commission (SUPARCO), Regional Support Office of UN-SPIDER in Pakistan, has published two land
cover atlases in Pakistan based on 5m resolution SPOT-5 imagery, which are available for download in pdf
format (link to the data). For many African countries, land cover data are available from FAO's Africover
project including Sudan, Kenya, Senegal, Libya, Egypt, Eritrea, and DR Congo (link to the data).
Online land cover mapping using REMAP
The Remote Ecosystem Monitoring & Assessment Pipeline (REMAP) allows users without the otherwise
needed, hard or software and/or training to create land cover maps. It is a web-based, free, opensource
and globally available tool. In order for a user to create land cover maps, a 7-step based progress based
on semiautomated mapping needs to be followed. Once the region of interest is selected, users are required
to train the random forest classifier that REMAP utilises to create land cover maps; this process is well
explained in the tutorial provided on the remap web app (https://remap-app.org). It is currently limited to
areas of around 100,000km 2 however according to REMAP (2017) this area might increase in the future.
REMAP also offers users to upload field observations or other point based data in .csv file format. It is
recommended that users with or no little experience in land cover mapping should create their landcover
maps based on ISO standards mentioned earlier. Once the random forest classifier is trained the web app
automatically creates the desired land cover map. The map can be downloaded in a range of formats for
further use in more complex analysis.

Further reading: A recent review of the current status and future trends of global land cover maps has been
published by Brice Mora et al. (2014) (dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7969-3_2).What are land cover maps
used for?