Pan-European Forest/Non-Forest Mapping Based on Landsat Data

Information of the spatial distribution of the entire European forest is needed for several forest-related applications, e.g. forest protection, conservation planning, and forest resourse analysis. Up to date there are several efforts of mapping European forests at different, from regional to continental scales; while the regional products may be accurate and of high resolution, the remaining problem is that they vary in level of detail, use diverse sources of information, and are based on different forest definitions. Therefore, their use for international comparison for various scientific, policy and reporting purposes is complex. In order to derive spatially detailed forest maps at continental scales, earth-observation data are currently the most obvious solution due to their consistency over large areas, growing computing power and relative low processing costs (Franklin and Wulder 2002; Wulder et al. 2003). For Europe, forest mapping has been tested with the low resolution (1 km) Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) data (Häme et al. 2001) and the 180 m Wide Field Sensor (WiFS) data (GAF 2001). However, in order to fulfil the requirements for studies where the level of spatial detail is important, such as forest spatial patterns, imagery with a spatial resolution of better than 50 m needs to be used. One of the most common sources for this kind of data is the Landsat Thematic Mapper series of instruments.

PEKKARINEN Anssi;  REITHMAIER Lucia;  STROBL Peter; 

2008-12-18

AGILE

JRC43710

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC43710,