Jacobson, A;
Dhanota, J;
Godfrey, J;
Jacobson, H;
Rossman, Z;
Stanish, A;
Walker, H;
(2015)
A novel approach to mapping land conversion using Google Earth with an application to East Africa.
Environmental Modelling & Software
, 72
pp. 1-9.
10.1016/j.envsoft.2015.06.011.
Preview |
Text
Jacobson_A novel approachto mapping land conversion using Google Earth with an application to East Africa.pdf Download (4MB) | Preview |
Abstract
Effective conservation planning relies on the accurate identification of anthropogenic land cover. However, accessing localized information can be difficult or impossible in developing countries. Additionally, global medium-resolution land use land cover datasets may be insufficient for conservation planning purposes at the scale of a country or smaller. We thus introduce a new tool, GE Grids, to bridge this gap. This tool creates an interactive user-specified binary grid laid over Google Earth's high-resolution imagery. Using GE Grids, we manually identified anthropogenic land conversion across East Africa and compared this against available land cover datasets. Nearly 30% of East Africa is converted to anthropogenic land cover. The two highest-resolution comparative datasets have the greatest agreement with our own at the regional extent, despite having as low as 44% agreement at the country level. We achieved 83% consistency among users. GE Grids is intended to complement existing remote sensing datasets at local scales.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | A novel approach to mapping land conversion using Google Earth with an application to East Africa |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1016/j.envsoft.2015.06.011 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2015.06.011 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | ©2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This article is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). You may copy and distribute the article, create extracts, abstracts and new works from the article, alter and revise the article, text or data mine the article and otherwise reuse the article commercially (including reuse and/or resale of the article) without permission from Elsevier. You must give appropriate credit to the original work, together with a link to the formal publication through the relevant DOI and a link to the Creative Commons user license above. You must indicate if any changes are made but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use of the work. Permission is not required for this type of reuse. |
| Keywords: | Google Earth; Land conversion; East Africa; Land use land cover; Conservation planning; GE grids |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1469970 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
