Methods
Land Cover Legend for the Assessment of Drivers of Deforestation and Forest Degradation in West Africa
The following slides propose a simplified land cover legend with 21 classes to use for the assessment of drivers of deforestation and forest degradation in the ECOWAS region based on the West African Land Cover Reference System, which contains over sixty land cover classes. Our selection and aggregation of land cover classes to include in the DDD assessment prioritizes classes that are relevant, comprehensive, and technically feasible.
ECOWAS Land Cover Legend - 20220314 - v1 - Eng.pdfGuide for Visual Interpretation of Drivers of Deforestation and Forest Degradation in the ECOWAS Region
This guide presents all of the steps necessary for visual interpretation of land use, land cover, and key drivers of forest change. The guide includes a visual recap of the DDD ECOWAS land cover legend, as well as steps for data collection with Collect Earth Online.
DDD ECOWAS Visual Guide - Eng - 20230419.pdfValidation of Change with Collect Earth & Collect Earth Online
The DDD ECOWAS Assessment used Collect Earth and Collect Earth Online to validate sites of forest change and sites with stable forest cover. These two Open Foris tools provide different functionalities.
Collect Earth facilitates access to very high resolution (sub-meter) satellite imagery within Google Earth. The temporal availability of imagery varies across the ECOWAS region; however, the images that are available have single image acquisition dates, which is essential for identifying land use and land cover at specific periods of time within the assessment period. A simple Collect Earth survey was designed with Collect to import the sampling design and plot layout into Google Earth. The data collection functionality of Collect Earth is not used.
Collect Earth Online facilitates access to 10m Sentinel 2 and Sentinel 1 imagery, 30m Landsat imagery, very high resolution multitemporal composites, and vegetation index time series. Collect Earth Online also hosts the data collection survey for the assessment, and it consolidates data contributed from multiple countries and offices into a single, centralized data repository online.
Access Collect Earth Online here
Contact adia.bey@fao.org to request access to the DDD ECOWAS Project