Using Meris on Envisat for Land Cover Mapping

This paper describes the results of a study towards the use of MERIS for land cover mapping at a national scale, using the Netherlands as a test site. Full resolution MERIS data of February 18 2003, April 16 2003, June 16 2003 and July 14 2003 were used in this study. The Dutch land use database LGN was used as a reference by aggregating the database from 25 m to 300 m. Results showed very good geometric characteristics of the MERIS images used in this study. Major land cover classes could be differentiated by their spectral signatures. For land cover classification best results in terms of classification accuracies were obtained for the image of July 14, 2003. The merit of MERIS lies primarily in the improved spatial resolution of the full resolution mode (300 m) when compared to lowresolution sensors. The use of multitemporal data analysis was also explored.