Abstract
Abstract. This study aims to contribute to the understanding of the Congo Basin forests by delivering a detailed map of vegetation types with an improved spatial discrimination and coherence for the whole Congo Basin region. A total of 20 land cover classes were described with the standardized Land Cover Classification System (LCCS) developed by the FAO. Based on a semi-automatic processing chain, the Congo Basin vegetation types map was produced by combining 19 months of observations from the Envisat MERIS full resolution products (300 m) and 8 yr of daily SPOT VEGETATION (VGT) reflectances (1 km). Four zones (north, south and two central) were delineated and processed separately according to their seasonal and cloud cover specificities. The discrimination between different vegetation types (e.g. forest and savannas) was significantly improved thanks to the MERIS sharp spatial resolution. A better discrimination was achieved in cloudy areas by taking advantage of the temporal consistency of the SPOT VGT observations. This resulted in a precise delineation of the spatial extent of the rural complex in the countries situated along the Atlantic coast. Based on this new map, more accurate estimates of the surface areas of forest types were produced for each country of the Congo Basin. Carbon stocks of the Basin were evaluated to a total of 49 360 million metric tons. The regional scale of the map was an opportunity to investigate what could be an appropriate tree cover threshold for a forest class definition in the Congo Basin countries. A 30% tree cover threshold was suggested. Furthermore, the phenology of the different vegetation types was illustrated systematically with EVI temporal profiles. This Congo Basin forest types map reached a satisfactory overall accuracy of 71.5% and even 78.9% when some classes are aggregated. The values of the Cohen's kappa coefficient, respectively 0.64 and 0.76 indicates a result significantly better than random.
Highlights
Central Africa contains the second largest and the least degraded area of contiguous moist tropical forest in the world (de Wasseige et al, 2009)
This study aims to contribute to the understanding of the Congo Basin forests by delivering a detailed map of vegetation types with an improved spatial discrimination and coherence for the whole Congo Basin region
This study aims to contribute to the delivery of a detailed vegetation types map with an improved spatial discrimination and spatially coherent for the whole Congo Basin region
Summary
Central Africa contains the second largest and the least degraded area of contiguous moist tropical forest in the world (de Wasseige et al, 2009). It provides huge ecosystem services from the local scale to the global one, in various economic, social and ecological domains (Mayaux et al, 2009). In recent years, improving regional and national capabilities to monitor forest extent has been an important concern in tropical areas. The first global land cover maps were derived from satellite observations using Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) NDVI data (DeFries and Townshend, 1994; DeFries et al, 1998; Hansen et al, 2000; Loveland et al, 1999). The MODIS Global Land Cover map has been quite improved recently, generated at 500 m spatial resolution over the Modis Collection 5 (Friedl et al, 2010)
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