Combining available land cover and tree cover maps for producing a hybrid forest map of Africa at 30M

The need for quantitative and accurate information to characterize the state and evolution of forest types at the regional and continental scales is widely recognized. Various global land cover maps derived from satellite imagery depict several forest classes, but these maps are either too coarse or present large discrepancies. Recently a global forest change product (GFC) has been produced at 30 m resolution which is more adequate for forest monitoring purposes. However this product does not contain any thematic class and it is not possible to use a single global tree cover threshold for identifying forest areas. In order to map the main forest types at the continental scale, we developed a methodology that combines the best available spatial information to produce a hybrid map at 30m resolution for the year 2012. Such hybrid map was produced for the African continent. This map provides a much finer spatial resolution compared to existing global and continental land cover products in particular for the delineation of linear features such as the gallery forests.