Land Cover Mapping of Iceland and Southern Greenland

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Land Cover Mapping of Iceland and Southern
Greenland Global Land Cover 2000
S. Bartalev (JRC EC), V. Egorov (IKI RAN) and E.
Bartholomé (JRC EC)
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Features of regions environment and land cover

• Duration of vegetation season is extremely
  short and does not exceed three months
• Vegetation is mainly presented by tundra type
  plants adapted to severe climate
• Land cover is highly degraded as result of
  intensive human impact
• Volcanic activity results in extensive lava
  fields and specific atmospheric conditions
• Glaciers and permanent snow are significant
  components of the land cover

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Link to Circumpolar Arctic Vegetation Map

• Map legend and classes definitions are adopted
• Greenland land cover map is involved as
  reference data
• Iceland land cover is not completed in the CAVM

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Iceland Vegetation Map

• Iceland Vegetation Map was used as a reference
  data
• Correspondence of the map legend classes to the
  CAVM definitions were taken into account

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SPOT 4 - VEGETATION data

• Both standard data products S1 and S10,
  including spectral channels and NDVI, for the
  year 2000 were investigated
• Initial data set covers whole year, but
  because of low Sun elevation the data products
  contain nonzero values for the period from March
  until October only
• Angular dependence of reflectance properties
  were not taken into account

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Methodological approach

• Detection of pixels contaminated by clouds,
  non-permanent snow/ice and defective SWIR
  detectors
• Synthesis of spectral channels' mosaics for
  certain time intervals with use of
  non- contaminated data only
• Land cover types classification (hybrid
  supervised and unsupervised approach) using
  mosaics of spectral channels

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Signatures of the land cover classes and clouds
NDSI and RED-channel bi-dimensional space
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Contaminated pixels detection
Step 1 Detection of the pixels related to snow
Step 2 Detection of the pixels contaminated by
clouds
Step 3 Detection of the pixels contaminated by
defective SWIR detectors (two iterations)
where
- reflectance in the Blue, Red and SWIR channels
- the mean of
- standard deviation of
,
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Estimation of the time window for mosaics'
synthesis

• Snow cover is present most of the time during
  the year
• Vegetation growing season is nearly ten decades

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Summer mosaics of Iceland derived from S1 and S10
products
derived from S1 products
derived from S10 products
Period considered is June-August of 2000
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Icelands monthly mosaics derived from S1 products
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Land Cover Map legend
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Land cover classification

• unsupervised classification of Iceland with
  referencing to Vegetation Map of Iceland
• supervised classification of Greenland by using
  Iceland labeled clusters map reference signatures
• merging of Iceland and Greenland labeled
  clusters into thematic classes

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The land cover of Southern Greenland and Iceland
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The land cover of Iceland
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Statistic of land covered classes
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Conclusions

• Essential advantage of S1 data product in
  comparison to S10 data product for land cover
  mapping over Iceland and Greenland was
  demonstrated
• Hybrid of unsupervised and supervised
  classification approach for Iceland and Southern
  Greenland land cover mapping was applied to
  cover the lack of reference data
• Interaction with CAVM project and feedback from
  users of the product is expected to examine and
  improve quality of land mapping if necessary