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ISLSCP Initiative II Home General Data Overview Vegetation Data Overview |
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ISLSCP Initiative II |
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Vegetation Data
The objective of this study was to derive continuous fields of vegetation cover from multi-temporal Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) data using all available bands and derived Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). The continuous fields describe sub-pixel proportions of cover for tree, herbaceous, bare ground and water cover types. For tree cover, additional fields describing leaf longevity (evergreen and deciduous) and leaf morphology (broadleaf and needleleaf) were also generated. The modeling of carbon dynamics and climate require knowing tree characteristics such as these. These products were resampled and aggregated to 0.25, 0.5 and 1.0 degree grids for the International Satellite Land Surface Climatology Project (ISLSCP) data initiative II. The data set describes the geographic distributions of three fundamental vegetation characteristics: tree, herbaceous and bare ground cover, plus a water layer. For tree cover, leaf longevity and morphology layers were produced.
Data Provider: Ruth DeFries, Matthew C. Hansen
 Data Files (ISLSCP II Disc #1) |
 Data Set Documentation |
 Image Viewing Tutorial |
The files can be decompressed using the PKZip program. The data sets in this directory are provided at three spatial resolutions of 0.25, 0.5 and 1 degrees lat./long. For each spatial resolution there are eight files describing the percentage, from 0 to 100, of the following global continuous fields:
| Value | Description |
|---|---|
| 1 | Bare Cover |
| 2 | Herbaceous cover |
| 3 | Tree cover |
| 4 | Water |
| 5 | Deciduous tree cover |
| 6 | Evergreen tree cover |
| 7 | Needleleaf tree cover |
The files for 1) are called bare_percent_xx.asc, where xx is qd, hd, or 1d, denoting a spatial resolution of 1/4, 1/2 or 1degree, respectively. The files for 2) are called herb_percent_xx.asc, with xx as above, and so on for the different continuous fields. Missing data points are listed as -999.
Related Pages:
ISLSCP Initiative II Home
General Data Overview
Vegetation Data Overview
Continuous Fields of Vegetation Cover
Revision Date: November 29, 2004