A continental and regional approach for improving land-cover maps of Africa

Land cover information is needed to measure the impact and effectiveness of management actions associated with sustainable development policies. Addressing issues such as sustainable management and use of forests and other land resources in developing countries, forest conservation and restoration, extension of surfaces dedicated to agriculture, desertification or watershed degradation will all substantially benefit from the availability of accurate baseline land cover information. Thus the need to document the extent and condition of the world’s ecosystems is well recognised. This is especially true in tropical areas, where land cover change has occurred at unprecedented rates in recent decades. Geospatial representations of African land cover in forms we would recognise as maps have been produced since at least the 16th Century, but viewing (let alone mapping) the entire land mass in a consistent and uniform way and of representing actual land cover over a fixed, contiguous period of time was unimaginable until the end of the 20th Century. In this chapter, we will present two continental land-cover maps of Africa, GLC2000 and Globcover, and a regional multi-source map of the Congo Basin

MAYAUX Philippe;  VANCUTSEM Christelle;  PEKEL Jean-François;  DE WASSEIGE Carlos;  DEFOURNY Pierre;  HANSEN Matthew C.;  MANE Landing; 

2013-01-08

Taylor and Francis Group LLC

JRC70457

978-1-4200-7074-3,   

http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781420070743,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC70457,