Improving Land Cover Product-Based Estimates of the Extent of Fragmented Cover Types

The effects of changing land use/land cover on regional and global climate ecosystems depends on accurate estimates of the extent of critical land cover types such as Arctic wetlands and fire scars in boreal forests. To address this information requirement, land cover products at coarse spatial resolution such as Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) -based maps and the MODIS Land Cover Product are being produced. The accuracy of the extent of highly fragmented cover types such as fire scars and ponds is in doubt because much (the numerous scars and ponds smaller than the pixel size) is missed. A promising method for improving areal estimates involves modeling the observed distribution of the fragment sizes as a type of truncated distribution, then estimating the sum of unobserved sizes in the lower, truncated tail and adding it to the sum of observed fragment sizes. The method has been tested with both simulated and actual cover products.