Widespread anthropogenic land cover change over the last five centuries has influenced the global climate system through both biogeochemical and biophysical processes. Models indicate that warming from carbon emissions associated with land cover conversion has been partially offset by cooling from elevated albedo, but considerable uncertainty remains partly because of uncertainty in model treat...

The use of post-classification change methods for the analysis of land cover change provides intuitive and potentially reliable results. A recurring problem is the difference in land cover nomenclature that can occur over time or across space when multiple data sources are required. Building on work that uses category semantics as a foundation for reasoning with land cover classes, this paper u...

This document details the structural definition, development process, and functional flow of the MODIS Land-Cover Product. The Land Cover and Land-Cover Change Parameters were proposed by the MODIS Land Team, with Team Member Alan Strahler leading the effort. The Land Cover Parameter is a 1-km product provided on a quarterly basis beginning about one year following the acquisition of a global d...

This paper presents an econometric analysis of land-cover change in western Honduras. Ground-truthed satellite image analysis indicates that between 1987 and 1996, net reforestation occurred in the 1,015.12 km study region. While some reforestation can be attributed to a 1987 ban on logging, the area of reforestation greatly exceeds that of previously clear-cut areas. Further, new area was also...

change is important because it is the only way to evaluate the Abstract consequences of current and recent land-cover trends for the An approach to simulating land-cover change based on pairs of future fragmentation of the landscape. classified images is presented. The method conditions the Transition probability models have been used extensively simulations on three sources of information: an ...

Projections of land cover change generated from integrated assessment models (IAM) and other economic-based models can be applied for analyses of environmental impacts at sub-regional and landscape scales. For those IAM and economic models that project land cover change at the continental or regional scale, these projections must be downscaled and spatially distributed prior to use in climate o...

An understanding of land use/land cover change at local, regional, and global scales is important in an increasingly human-dominated biosphere. Here, we report on an under-appreciated complexity in the analysis of land cover change important in arid and semi-arid environments. In these environments, some land cover types show a high degree of inter-annual variability in productivity. In this st...