Water Mask pages.
Min Feng and Raghuram Narasimhan attended the Geotech 2009 conference on 5th and 6th, October, in Silver Spring, MD. This annual conference organized by ASPRS highlights some of the latest technological advancements in the geospatial industry.
August 2009
The Global Land Survey (GLS) is an enhanced and expanded edition of the GeoCover Landsat collection. GLS contains four epochs (1975, 1990, 2000, 2005) of terrain corrected Landsat imagery covering all vegetated land surfaces. The Global Land Cover Facility provides free access to this high quality imagery product via three means: through the web tool ESDI, through FTP and through hard media. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) has coordinated the collection, including orthorectification and mosaicing accomplished by MDA Federal, and made a copy available for free to the world through their GLOVIS and Earth Explorer data portals. This is the most comprehensive collection of high integrity, high resolution satellite imagery for the world currently available. Please contact the GLCF for further information or visit the USGS GLS web site.
To access the GLS collection in ESDI:
- Open ESDI at: http://glcfapp.umiacs.umd.edu:8080/esdi/index.jsp
- Open the Map Search tool
- Click on the desired Landsat sensor at the upper left of the tool. Keep in mind that GLS1975 should have only MSS, GLS1990 should have TM, GLS2000 should have ETM+ and GLSS2005 should have TM, ETM+ and ALI. For this example, click on the ETM+ sensor.
- In the Require box, click on the GLS option.
- Click Update Map to engage choices.
- The map shows pink fill for anywhere on the map that meets the criteria. Zoom in and select a particular scene, or open the path/row tab and enter a desired location. For this example, click on the Path/Row tab on top of the map area. Enter "15" for path and "33" for row. Click Update Map again.
- Click the Preview and Download button and available scenes will be listed. Note that GLS2000 is listed under "Attr." for attribute. To download this scene, click the Download button.
July 2009
John Townshend, director of GLCF has been named as the dean of University of Maryland's College of Behavioral and Social Sciences (BSOS) effective July 27, 2009. BSOS is largest amongst University of Maryland's 13 colleges and schools and offers four of the five most popular majors on the campus. Read more here.
June 2009
ESDI services will undergo maintenance on June 22, 2009, from 10AM to 4PM. While the ESDI interface will be unavailable then, users may still access our archive via FTP at ftp://ftp.glcf.umiacs.umd.edu . We apologize for any inconvenience.
John Townshend, Min Feng and Xiaopeng Song of the Global Land Cover Facility participated in the Numerical Terradynamic Simulation Group (NTSG) 4th Global Vegetation Workshop held in Missoula, Montana on June 16-19, 2009. Dr. Townshend, Project Director of the GLCF, gave a keynote presentation on "Grand Challenges in Global Remote Sensing". Dr. Feng presented a poster on "Towards Developing Earth Science Data Records of Global Forest Cover Change", while Mr. Song presented another poster on "Development of an Improved 5km Continuous Field of Forest Cover Product".
John Townshend has been selected as the 2009 recipient of the University's Landmark award. This is presented annually to a faculty member who has exhibited long-term international service to the University.
The award will be presented on November 18th by the Provost in the Prince George's Room in the Stamp Student Union.
John Townshend has been made an Honorary Fellow of the United Kingdom's Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry Society.
Honorary membership is awarded to individuals of prominence in the field of remote sensing and photogrammetry.
The award was made by Paul Aplin, Chairman of the Society, when John visited the UK to give the Society's Annual Lecture at the University of Nottingham on the topic of "Challenges and Opportunities for Terrestrial Earth Observation."
The GLCF team (John Townshend, C Huang, M Feng & Xiaopeng Song) attended the 2009 NASA LCLUC Science Team Meeting in Bethesda, Maryland and presented a poster on "Three Decades of Forest Cover Change in the Americas Evaluated Using the GLS Data Sets" (PDF 4.9MB). John Townshend, Director of the GLCF, also gave a talk on "Land Climate Observation Needs".
C Huang, Xiaopeng Song and Do-Hyung Kim of GLCF attended the 2009 AAG (Association of American Geographers) meeting held in Las Vegas between March 22-27, 2009. Do-Hyung Kim also presented a poster on "Land Cover Classificaiton of North Korea Utilizing MOD13Q1 Data" .
The GLCF announces the publication of "Assessment of Paraguay's forest cover change using Landsat Observations" in Global and Planetary Change. Please review at Elsevier's site for the Global and Planetary Change journal.
January 2009
Job Openings at the GLCF: full-time to hourlies
Update:Land Cover Analyst position is no longer open.
The Global Land Cover Facility has job openings available for immediate occupation.A Land Cover Analyst is needed to help generate global land cover products for NASA,
and a Spatial Data Analyst is needed to help coordinate and transform data collections. Please apply!
GLCF attends Federation of ESIPs winter meeting
The GLCF team attended the 2009 winter meeting of the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIPs).
As a founding member of the Federation GLCF staff was pleased to participate in numerous activities at the Washington, D.C. location.
In particular, John Townshend, Director of the GLCF, presented the first Martha Maiden Award,
to NASA's Martha Maiden, for her outstanding contributions to Earth Science and the Federation.
Please click here to proceed to the pictures.
Users may now search in the Earth
Science Data Interface (ESDI) using protected area boundaries.
A derivative of the World Database on Protected Areas is available as a searchable Map Layer in the
ESDI Map Search interface. To use, open ESDI, zoom to the area of interest, click on the Map Layers
tag to select the Protected Areas and click Update Map to display. The user can then click on the Place
tag and enter the name of a protected area such as "Serengeti". Once that becomes the search polygon, then
the user can click the imagery of interest, such as "ETM+" and find all the ETM+ imagery available
for the Serengeti National Park.
New UNEP Atlas of Africa Available
UNEP, in collaboration with UMD GLCF and many others, has produced a new Atlas of Africa
as part of their Atlas of our Changing Environment series. This text includes many Landsat
images comparing a site before and after land cover change. Viewing these changes side by
side is a powerful means of illustrating both positive and negative environmental impacts.
Visit the UNEP site forr more details,
an online PDF edition of the text, and ordering information.
The GLCF is pleased to promote use of quality satellite imagery from the ALOS satellite. Our colleagues at the
Remote Sensing Technology Center of Japan (RESTEC) have made
ALOS imagery available through their agreement with the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA). ALOS has three sensors
capturing well documented, high precision, Earth observation imagery: PRISM, PALSAR and AVNIR-2. PRISM imagery is a 2.5m
resolution panchromatic sensor with three cameras to collect a forward, nadir and backward acquisition; a very
effective system for stereo mapping. PALSAR is an L-band SAR instrument, capturing small to large swaths,
depending on scan mode. AVNIR-2 is a 10m resolution multispectral sensor, providing four bands from blue to NIR.
Use RESTEC's online archive search interface, called CROSS, to locate and order ALOS imagery.
Flood maps derived from 250m MODIS imagery have been generated by the University of Maryland,
Department of Geography. Coverage includes areas of the 2008 cyclone flooding in Myanmar/Burma as well as the
2008 US Midwest. For more information
about this product visit the Flood Maps data pages.
The Global Land Cover Facility has received multiple awards from NASA programs to continue activities for several years.
This includes a continuation of GLCF operations as well as the development of new land cover products.
The GLCF and collaborators at UMD, NASA GSFC and SDSU will generate a new series of global forest cover and forest cover
change products. Each data set produced will meet the new, high standard of an Earth Science Data Record (ESDR).
Our primary activity will be through the NASA MEaSUREs program, with additional research and operation through NASA's EOS
and LCLUC programs. We are appreciative of all the support received from users through email, our help-us-help-you site,
and formal letters. Our goal is to continue serving the community with high quality, reliable Earth science materials.
A research team led by John Townshend at the University of Maryland Global Land Cover Facility was awarded a project
in the NASA MEaSUREs program. Titled "Earth Science Data Records of Global Forest Cover Change", this project will involve
GLCF staff over the next several years, with details in the following abstract.
Abstract:
There is long-standing recognition of the need for global forest change detection at Landsat-class resolutions. Previously
this was not feasible, because of the absence of well registered multi-temporal data sets, variations in sensors, the need
for intensive human input during post-processing, variations in spectral responses of forests, the efforts needed
to create validation data sets and the computational and storage demands in carrying out the analysis. We demonstrate
in this proposal that these problems have now been overcome by the availability of the GeoCover and the forthcoming
Mid-Decadal Global Land Survey (MDGLS) data sets, our ability to create atmospherically corrected reflectance products, much
improved classifiers, collection of automated dense training sets, the availability of ultra-fine resolution datasets and much lower
computational costs. We therefore propose to produce the following Earth Science Data Records (ESDR) at fine and moderate
spatial resolutions and provide the algorithms and services for producing such products:
- Global fine resolution (< 100 m) surface reflectance ESDR for four epochs centered around 1990, 2000, and 2005;
- Fine resolution (< 100 m) forest cover change (FCC) ESDR between the four epochs;
- Fragmentation products derived from the fine resolution FCC products;
- Global 250-m vegetation continuous field (VCF) based FCC ESDR from 2000 to 2005;
- FCC ESDR products aggregated from the fine resolution and the 250 m FCC products to 250 m, 500 m, 1 km, and
0.05° grids for use by carbon, biogeochemical and hydrological modelers;
- Subsets of the above products for protected areas of the world and their buffer zones.
In addition to providing these products at the native resolutions and the above listed modeling resolutions, we will
also provide estimates of forest cover change from 1990 to 2005 at country, biome, continental, and global levels.
The Global Land Cover Facility participated in the NASA Earth Science Data Systems Working Group meeting in Philadelphia,
Oct 27 - 25.
The Global Land Cover Facility has received resources to continue data center operations
for the near term. We thank the Science Mission Directorate at NASA for their continued support,
as well as the many individuals who contributed letters to keep the GLCF going. Our constant goal
is to make current and enhanced services available to all.
The Vegetation Continuous Fields (VCF) product has been enhanced and expanded in a new edition.
This includes the improved MODIS Collection 4 processing, providing more accurate MODIS inputs.
The Collection 4 edition of VCF includes percent tree cover products for each year from 2000-2005,
allowing users to view annual assessments. Additionally, while the Collection 3 is still available
that edition is constrained to large, continental tiles, the Goodes projection and MODIS spheroid.
The new Collection edition of VCF is available in the UMD tile scheme based upon UTM zones - making
it ready for use with Landsat imagery. The product format is GeoTIFF, projection is geographic,
with WGS84 datum - all designed to be easily implemented in most image processing and GIS software packages.
The Vegetation Cover Conversion (VCC) product generated at the University of Maryland is now available through the GLCF.
For further information regarding this product please review the Data and Products page.
The GLCF website will be down for power system upgrades from 5:00 p.m. on Friday
, August 11 and 11:59 p.m. (EST) on Saturday, August 12.
Services will be restored as soon as possible. We apologize for any inconvenien
ce.
