Medium resolution land cover mapping of Canada from SPOT 4/5 data / [by] I. Olthof, R. Latifovic and D. Pouliot.: M103-3/4-2015E-PDF

Medium resolution land cover is one of the most widely used geospatial datasets for environmental assessment in Canada. Canada’s current coverage is from circa-2000 Landsat and is therefore out-of-date. With an update of the medium resolution orthoimage coverage of Canada from circa-2000 30 m Landsat to 2005 – 2010 20 m SPOT 4-5 imagery, an opportunity presented itself to update Canada’s land cover with improved spatial resolution. Previous experience mapping the Northern Land Cover of Canada (NLCC) taught us to efficiently map at the national scale from Landsat, however the SPOT dataset required new approaches to deal with problems related to phenology and a smaller image footprint compared to Landsat. This paper presents solutions to the problems of radiometric normalization and classification extension with the objective of producing a consistent and accurate medium resolution national scale land cover. A 20 m SPOT land cover of Canada’s forested regions at a 16 class thematic level is presented with full validation using nearly 1600 reference points across Canada. The overall accuracy of the product is 71% for strict assessment and 85% if relaxed to account for geolocation errors. An assessment of the product along the treeline ecotone suggests an improvement over existing land cover, while northward the product merges better with the existing circa-2000 Northern Land Cover of Canada from Landsat.

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