Research project T4/DD/57 (Research action T4)
METAFRO, the information system of the Royal Museum for Central Africa, is interested in the creation (and possibly the yearly update) of a medium resolution land cover map of the Central African region. The product should also be available in vector format, because it has to serve as background base map for the execution of geographical queries on the meta-database of the METAFRO project.
In this document, VITO's Centre of Expertise "Remote Sensing and Atmospheric Processes" (TAP) proposes to produce the required land cover map at l km2 resolution, based on a full year of NDVI-syntheses (36 consecutive 10-day composites), provided by the recently launched earth observation system SPOT4-VEGETATION. The proposed methodology has already been implemented with success on similar data sets of NOAA-AVHRR and it mainly comprises a supervised classification scheme, applied on the seasonal/phenological information extracted from the original NDVI-images.
The raster-to-vector conversion will be performed afterwards by "on-screen digitisation" of the discerned land units.
The study is budgeted at 699,000 BEF and will be executed in a period of 2.5 months, starting in June 1999.
METAFRO will be able to evaluate the feasibility of the approach, based on the results of the cartographic accuracy (error matrices) and the analysis of the costs involved.
