@Article{Ran2010, author="Ran, Youhua and Li, Xin and Lu, Ling", title="Evaluation of four remote sensing based land cover products over China", journal="International Journal of Remote Sensing", year="2010", volume="31", number="2", abstract="Precise global/regional land cover mapping is of fundamental importance in studies of land surface processes and modelling. Quantitative assessments of the map quality and classification accuracy for existing land cover maps will help to improve accuracy in future land cover mapping. We compare and evaluate four land cover datasets over China. The datasets include the Version 2 global land cover dataset of IGBP, MODIS land cover map 2001, a global land cover map produced by the University of Maryland, and the land cover map produced by the global land cover for the year 2000 (GLC 2000) project coordinated by the Global Vegetation Monitoring Unit of the European Commission Joint Research Centre. The four maps used different classification systems, which made the comparison difficult. So we first aggregated these maps by reclassifying them using a unified legend system. A large-scale, i.e. 1:100 000 land cover map of China was used as the reference data to validate the four maps. The results show that the GLC20...", issn="0143-1161" }