Extensive land cover change across Arctic-Boreal Northwestern North America from disturbance and climate forcing.

A multitude of disturbance agents, such as wildfires, land use, and climate-driven expansion of woody shrubs, is transforming the distribution of plant functional types across Arctic-Boreal ecosystems, which has significant implications for interactions and feedbacks between terrestrial ecosystems and climate in the northern high-latitude. However, because the spatial resolution of existing land cover datasets is too coarse, large-scale land cover changes in the Arctic-Boreal region (ABR) have been poorly characterized. Here, we use 31 years (1984-2014) of moderate spatial resolution (30 m) satellite imagery over a region spanning 4.

Inconsistent estimates of forest cover change in China between 2000 and 2013 from multiple datasets: differences in parameters, spatial resolution, and definitions.

The Chinese National Forest Inventory (NFI) has reported increased forest coverage in China since 2000, however, the new satellite-based dataset Global Forest Change (GFC) finds decreased forest coverage. In this study, four satellite datasets are used to investigate this discrepancy in forest cover change estimates in China between 2000 and 2013: forest cover change estimated from MODIS Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR), existing MODIS Land Cover (LC) and Vegetation Continuous Fields (VCF) products, and the Landsat-based GFC. Among these satellite datasets, forest loss shows much better agreement in terms of total change area and spatial pattern than do forest gain.