A novel approach to mapping land conversion using Google Earth with an application to East Africa

作者：Jacobson Andrew^*; Dhanota Jasjeet; Godfrey Jessie; Jacobson Hannah; Rossman Zoe; Stanish Andrew; Walker Hannah; Riggio Jason

来源：Environmental Modelling & Software, 2015, 72: 1-9.

DOI：10.1016/j.envsoft.2015.06.011

• Google Earth
• Land conversion
• East Africa
• Land use land cover
• Conservation planning
• GE grids

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.

• 出版日期2015-10