Remote Sensing Needs for State Forestry Agencies

The research conducted under this project addresses the need to develop improvedregional and global land cover products that incorporate spatial and temporalheterogeneity of vegetation based on satellite data. The research focuses on bothconventional land cover classification products and alternative approaches to depict land-cover heterogeneity and land cover changes over large areas. The applications of theseproducts are primarily regional and global biosphere-atmosphere model. In previousreporting periods, accomplishments were: developing a global land cover training setderived from a global network of high resolution imagery publication and distribution ofa global land cover classification based on 8km AVHRR data and developing alternativeapproaches to describing spatial heterogeneity to estimate proportional cover ofvegetation types. In this reporting period, the effort has focused on: 1) global land coverclassification from 1km AVHRR data for 1992-93 2) application of method to derivecontinuous fields of vegetation characteristics to 1km AVHRR data and the full timeseries of AVHRR 8km data 3) distribution of products through the University ofMaryland Global Land Cover Facility and 4) application of products in biosphere atmospheremodels.