Large-scale land cover change monitoring from dense time series of satellite data

Land cover is essential for a wide variety of users, ranging from land owners to national governments to the scientific community for modelling climate change. Monitoring the change in land cover allows stakeholders to take informed decisions about how to control their land, and allows scientists to use more accurate models that take land variability into account.

In this project, the methods for creating and updating land cover change products will be improved by:

1. performing fractional land cover mapping in order to better express the reality on the ground, such as gradual land cover change, more precisely;
2. improving the reliability of temporal features obtained from remote sensing imagery time series by detecting breaks in the time series;
3. investigating land cover map updating methods to reduce spurious changes between annual land cover maps;
4. deriving land cover change products from fractional land cover data. The combination of these methods will allow for a more consistent and accurate representation of land cover changes happening through time at a global scale.