European forest cover mapping with high resolution satellite data: The Carpathians case study

The aim of the study was to elaborate a methodology for forest mapping based on high resolution satellite data, relevant for reporting on forest cover and spatial pattern changes in Europe. The Carpathians were selected as a case study area and mapped using 24 Landsat scenes, processed independently with a supervised approach combining image segmentation, knowledge-based rules to extract a training set and the maximum likelihood decision rule. Validation was done with available very high resolution imagery. Overall accuracies per scene ranged from 93 to 96%. The labelling disagreement in overlapping areas of adjacent scenes was 6.8% on average. The proposed methodology is easily applicable to other regions in Europe. It allows an accurate forest-non-forest map to be obtained in a quick and cost effective manner, spatially more detailed than the currently available European data sets. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.