Development and assessment of a 250m spatial resolution MODIS annual land cover time series (2000–2011) for the forest region of Canada derived from change-based updating

Detailed information on the spatial and temporal distribution of land cover is required to evaluate the effects of land cover change on environmental processes. The development of temporally consistent land cover time series (LCTS) from satellite-based earth observation has proven difficult because multi-year observations are acquired under different conditions resulting in high inter-annual reflectance variability. This leads to spurious differences in land cover when standard approaches for image classification are applied to generate multi-year land cover data. To reduce this effect, a common solution has been to first detect change and update a base map for only these change areas. As long as the change commission error is low, this approach will ensure high consistency between maps in the time series. Here we present an approach for change-based LCTS development following from previous research, but with significant advancements in change detection, training, classification, and evidence-based refinement. The method was applied to generate an annual LCTS covering Canada spanning 2000–2011 that is consistent between years and can be used to identify dominant change transitions. Assessment of the LCTS was challenging because multiple maps needed to be evaluated and can be prohibitive particularly for annual time series covering several years. Three approaches were undertaken involving visual examination, comparison with a reference sample derived from Landsat, and comparison with the MODIS Global LCTS V5.1. Visual assessment revealed high inter-map consistency and logical temporal change trajectories of land cover classes. Comparison with the reference sample showed an accuracy of 70% at the 19 class thematic resolution. Accounting for mixed pixels by considering the first or second reference land cover label as correct increased the accuracy to 80%. Comparison with the MODIS Global LCTS showed that the Canada LCTS achieved higher inter-map consistency and accuracy as expected with national relative to global land cover products.