The ORNL DAAC announces the release of five land cover and land cover classification data sets associated with the International Satellite Land-Surface Climatology Project (ISLSCP).
ISLSCP II POTENTIAL NATURAL VEGETATION COVER. Data set prepared by N. Ramankutty and J.A. Foley. This data set contains global land cover of Potential Natural Vegetation (PNV) in terms of 15 major vegetation types, plus water. PNV, as defined here, does not necessarily represent the world's natural pre-human-disturbance vegetation. Rather, PNV represents the world's vegetation cover that would most likely exist for 1986 through 1995 in equilibrium with present-day climate and natural disturbance, in the absence of human activity.
ISLSCP II MODIS (COLLECTION 4) IGBP LAND COVER, 2000-2001. Data set prepared by M.A. Friedl, A.H. Strahler, and J. Hodges. This data set provides a global land cover classification (dominant type, classification confidence and fractional cover) generated using a full year of MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data covering the period from October 2000 through October 2001. The 17 land cover classifications schema used is that of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (IGBP).
ISLSCP II HISTORICAL CROPLANDS COVER, 1700-1992. Data set prepared by N. Ramankutty and J.A. Foley. This data set describes the fraction of each grid cell that is occupied by cultivated land from 1700 through 1992. This historical croplands cover data set was developed to understand the consequences of historical changes in land use and land cover for ecosystem goods and services, and can be used directly within spatially-explicit climate and biogeochemical models. Data layers are provided for every 50 years from 1700 to 1850, every 10 years from 1850 to 1980, and every year from 1986 to 1992.
ISLSCP II HISTORICAL LAND COVER AND LAND USE, 1700-1990. Data set prepared by K.K. Goldewijk. This data set describes historical land use changes over a 300-year peroid from 1700 through 1990. It was developed to provide the global change community with historical land use estimates. A historical database of the global environment (HYDE) was used to determine historical statistical inventories on agricultural land (census data, tax records, land surveys, etc.) and different spatial analysis techniques were used to create this geographically-explicit data set of land use change with a regular time interval.
ISLSCP II UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND GLOBAL LAND COVER CLASSIFICATION, 1992-1993. Data set prepared by R.S. DeFries and M. Hansen. This data set provides a land cover map derived from 1 kilometer AVHRR data using all available bands, derived Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), and a full year of data (April 1992-March 1993). The geographic distributions of 13 classes of vegetation cover (plus water and unclassified classes) are based on a modified International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) legend. The data set also provides the fraction of each of the 15 classes within the coarser resolution cells.
International Satellite Land-Surface Climatology Project (ISLSCP)
The ISLSCP Initiative II data collection is designed to support modeling studies of the global carbon, water and energy cycle. This data collection contains 50 global time series spanning the ten-year period 1986 to 1995 compiled under the guidance of Forrest Hall and colleagues at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The data for Initiative II were acquired from a number of U.S. and international agencies, universities, and institutions, then co-registered to equal-angle grids of one degree, one-half and one-quarter degree resolution and reformatted into a common ASCII format.
The collection includes a variety of remotely sensed data sets ranging from visible to microwave wavelengths. The data sets also include improved topography, surface radiation, near-surface meteorology, precipitation, runoff, soils, and vegetation data sets that can be used in a variety of interdisciplinary research activities. Several data sets to support global carbon and biogeochemical studies are also provided.
The ORNL DAAC is a NASA-funded data center archiving and distributing terrestrial ecology and biogeochemical dynamics data.