Annual land cover monitoring using 250M MODIS data for Mexico

Annual time series of land cover maps have the potential to monitor land cover changes at relatively short time scales. The North American Land Change Monitoring System (NALCMS) aims at providing such information by mapping 19 land cover classes consistently for Canada, the United States, and Mexico using 250m MODIS time series. Change detection relies on a map updating approach by first detecting areas of potential change and then reclassifying the land cover class for only those areas. This paper presents preliminary results for Mexico for the period from 2005 to 2011. The estimated mean area of annual change is approximately 160,000ha and thus relatively small. An advantage of this method is high map consistency in the land cover time series. The map consistency in the land cover time series is an advantage for long-term monitoring.