A new land cover map at 1 km resolution over Korea

The Global Land Cover 2000 (GLC 200) project, as a most recent issue, is to provide for the year 2000 a harmonized land cover database over the whole globe. The classifications were performed according to continental or regional scales by corresponding organization using the data of VEGETATION sensor onboard the SPOT4 Satellite. Even if The Global land cover classification for Asia provided by Chiba University showed a good accuracy in whole Asian area, some problems were detected in Korean region. Therefore, the construction of new land cover database over Korea is strongly required using more recent data set. The present study focuses on the development of a new upgraded land cover map at 1 km resolution over Korea considering the widely used K-means clustering, which is one of unsupervised classification technique using distance function for land surface pattern classification, and the principal components transformation. It is based on data sets from the Earth observing system SPOT4/VEGETATION. Newly classified land cover was compared with GLC 2000 for Korean peninsula to access how well classification performed using confusion matrix.