Yearly extraction of central America's land cover for carbon flux monitoring

Abstract

Ideal remote sensor land cover extraction for national to regional carbon flux monitoring constitutes highly accurate change detection on an annual basis, a challenge magnified in the cloud-occluded tropics. Focusing on seven Central American countries from Belize to Panama, this study tested the feasibility of yearly land cover extraction from MODIS surface reflectance composites, ancillary land cover maps, and country-produced reference polygons. GIS models were created to automate the country-specific process of generating annual input tables for a greenhouse gas inventory tool. MODIS-favorable results in a six-category schema suggest that improvements may depend on international reference data warehousing and interoperability. Copyright © 2007 by V. H. Winston & Son, Inc. All rights reserved.