Combining MISR, ETM+ and SAR data to improve land cover and land use classification for carbon cycle research

Accurate and reliable information about land cover and land use is essential to carbon cycle and climate change modeling. While historical regional-to-global scale land cover and land use data products had been produced by AVHRR and MSS/TM, this task has been advanced by sensors such as MODIS and ETM since the latter 1990s. While the accuracies and reliabilities of these data products have been improved, there have been reports from the modeling community that additional work is needed to reduce errors so that the uncertainties associated with the global carbon cycle and climate change modeling can be addressed. Remotely sensed data collected in different wavelength regions, at different viewing geometries, usually provide complementary information. Their combination has the potential to enhance remote sensing capabilities in discriminating important land cover components. In this paper, we studied multi-angle data fusion, and optical-SAR data fusion for land cover classification at regional spatial scale in the temperate forests of the eastern United States. Data from EOS-MISR, Landsat-ETM+ and RadarSat-SAR were used. The results showed significantly improved land cover classification accuracy when using the data fusion approach. These results may benefit future land cover products for global change research.