Land cover is the physical material at the surface of the earth. Land covers include grass, asphalt, trees, bare ground, water, etc. There are two primary methods for capturing information on land cover: field survey and analysis of remotely sensed imagery. The nature of land cover is discussed in Comber et al. (2005).
Land cover is distinct from land use despite the two terms often being used interchangeably. Land use is a description of how peo...
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Land cover is the physical material at the surface of the earth. Land covers include grass, asphalt, trees, bare ground, water, etc. There are two primary methods for capturing information on land cover: field survey and analysis of remotely sensed imagery. The nature of land cover is discussed in Comber et al. (2005).
Land cover is distinct from land use despite the two terms often being used interchangeably. Land use is a description of how people utilize the land and socio-economic activity - urban and agricultural land uses are two of the most commonly recognised high-level classes of use. At any one point or place, there may be multiple and alternate land uses, the specification of which may have a political dimension. The origins of the ‘land cover / land use’ couplet and the implications of their confusion are discussed in Fisher et al. (2005).
One of the major land cover issues (as with all natural resource inventories) is that every survey defines similarly named categories...
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