The LACO-Wiki tool represents an open access, online portal that offers standardized land cover validation at local to global scales. LACO-Wiki integrates the LACOVAL prototype for land cover validation and the Geo-Wiki system for visualization, validation and crowdsourcing of land cover. This paper presents a conceptual overview of the LACO-Wiki system and describes the main validation workflo...

An approach to simulating land-cover patterns based on historical land-use maps and forecasts based on models and planning documents is described and demonstrated. The approach uses stochastic spatial simulation to generate land-cover patterns on the basis of a land-use map and stated translation rules. The translation rules take the form of (1) a table that summarizes the proportions of each l...

Malaria is a major global public health problem, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. The spatial heterogeneity of malaria can be affected by factors such as hydrological processes, physiography, and land cover patterns. Tropical wetlands, for example, are important hydrological features that can serve as mosquito breeding habitats. Mapping and monitoring of wetlands using satellite remote sensi...

Traditionally, image registration of multi-modal and multi-temporal images is performed satisfactorily before land cover mapping. However, since multi-modal and multi-temporal images are likely to be obtained from different satellite platforms and/or acquired at different times, perfect alignment is very difficult to achieve. As a result, a proper land cover mapping algorithm must be able to co...

Land cover data represent a fundamental data source for various types of scientific research. The classification of land cover based on satellite data is a challenging task, and an efficient classification method is needed. In this study, an automatic scheme is proposed for the classification of land use using multispectral remote sensing images based on change detection and a semi-supervised c...

Land-cover mapping efforts within the USGS Gap Analysis Program have traditionally been state-centered; each state having the responsibility of implementing a project design for the geographic area within their state boundaries. The Southwest Regional Gap Analysis Project (SWReGAP) was the first formal GAP project designed at a regional, multi-state scale. The project area comprises the southwe...

The use of neural networks to classify land-cover from remote sensing imagery relies on the ability to determine a winner from the candidate land-cover types based on the imagery information available. In the case of a “winnertakes-all” scenario, this does not allow us a measure of how much the prediction of each pixel’s land-cover can be trusted. We present a three-stage method where only winn...