What is it about?
The paper describes how the national statistics of vegetation and land cover in Norway was compiled. The approach started with a sample of approximately 1100 locations distributed all over the country. At each location, a field crew made a detailed vegetation map covering approximately 1 km2. Taken together, these maps constitute an unbiased sample of the vegetation.
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Why is it important?
Vegetation and land cover is a resource. Information about the availability is important in land management and for solving conflicts over land use and land management. Issues linked to climate change also call for more and better knowledge about land cover and land cover change. Remote sensing is often used to map vegetation and land cover, but the inaccuracies lead to high uncertainty. Field surveys are expensive, but the sampling approach is a reasonable compromise.
Perspectives
Geographical sampling surveys is a cost-efficient approach to vegetation and land cover mapping when the aim is to provide national statistics for policy development and to fulfill international reporting obligations. These sampling surveys offers a viable alternative to the increased use of satellite remote sensing. Both approaches are linked to uncertainty, but the uncertainty in the sampling approach is statistical and can be calculated. Uncertainty in remote sensing is often linked to individual classes, and a field survey is actually required in order to describe it. A future perspective is therefore to have field based sampling surveys as a backbone of national and regional survey and monitoring systems, and to use data from these surveys as ground truth to improve and assess the results from remote sensing.
Geir-Harald Strand
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Norwegian area frame survey of land cover and outfield land resources, Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift - Norwegian Journal of Geography, February 2013, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/00291951.2012.760001.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Land cover in Norway based on an area frame survey of vegetation types
This paper describes the results from the vegetation and land cover survey of Norway
Composition and spatial structure of dwarf shrub heath in Norway
Analysis of the spatial distribution of the vegetation type Dwarf Shrub Heath using data from the national vegetation survey
Small-area estimation of land cover statistics by post-stratification of a national area frame survey
Demonstrates of Small Area Estimation can be used to provide vegetation and land cover statistics for a smaller area by post-stratification of data from the national survey using land-cover information in topographic maps.
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