Land Cover Analysis on Sub-Continental Scale: FAO LCCS Standard with 250 Meter MODIS Satellite Observations in West Africa

Land cover information is an essential parameter for many earth system models and studies. However, especially in Africa, rigorous, regional standardized and geometrical spatially explicit land cover data on medium scale is missing, or often inconsistent and outdated. In this study we employed well corrected 250-meter MODIS time-series observations from 2006 and 2007 to map land cover rigorously over the Volta Basin in West Africa, with focus on the Burkina Faso and Ghana respectively. We used the FAO land cover classification system (LCCS) standard [8] for the legend codes and 15-30 ASTER imagery as reference data to train the classification tree algorithm. Primary aim is to contribute to a continental African and standardized medium scale land over data base, with improved mapping accuracies. Therefore, the dataset presented here can be deemed interoperable that is between local scale studies, at finer resolutions, and 1-kilometer global land cover products.