Two Global Forest/Land cover mapping efforts: One Good, One Bad....

[IanThomas1]

Just to get the ball rolling....Last month I stumbled across the following two Global Forest/Land cover mapping efforts:

1. Land Cover (GLCNMO), Vegetation (Percent Tree Cover)

http://www.iscgm.org/browse.html

Which is Japanese led effort that mapped the world at 500 m resolution."Version 1" uses Modis 2003 imagery. "Version 2" uses Modis 2008 imagery. Unfortunately no newer dates so most of the big resent Cambodian deforestation missing but still looks like quite a reasonable mapping effort if you don't mind using a land cover back dating back to 2008.

2. Global Land Cover-SHARE of year 2014 - Beta-Release 1.0
http://www.glcn.org/databases/lc_glcshare_en.jsp

Which is yet another steaming pile of codswallop from the FAO. For example, according to this map Cambodian forests apparently consist mostly of 100% crown cover. Such a complete waste of time and effort.UN REDD is really dead when FAO persists in putting utter crap like this out in the public.

Enjoy,

Ian

[EduardoRosa]

Hi Thomas,

I think that global view of planetary land cover have a lot of value ... but we need local analises and works with detail scale. To advance sustainable development is necessary more quality information and the possibilities of monitoring the changes during a long time ... if possible with low costs ...

Thanks for share this two Global Forest/Land cover maps.