Forest Cover Fraction from MODIS

SMOS Soil moisture — MODIS global forest cover fraction in percent for July 2019. Copyright: UHH/CEN/S. Kern

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Access

UNRESTRICTED:

RESTRICTED: This link to the data set is only available for a restricted user group. The data set is only accessible in CEN/MPI net or accessible from external nets with a customer account. Please contact ICDC if you would like to access this data from outside the network.

Data access via file system: /data/icdc/land/modis_forestcoverfraction

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Description

This data set contains the forest cover fraction (FCF) derived from observations and products of the MODIS Sensor aboard EOS-TERRA. Data of an entire year are used to come up with a high-quality annual composite of the percentage tree or forest cover fraction. For this fraction the main vegetation type considered are trees; 100% forest cover fraction mean that the grid cell is entirely covered by forest; 0% forest cover fraction mean that the grid cell does not contain any forest. Additionally included are separate data layers of the percentage vegetation cover fraction (VCF) as well as of the percent fraction of non-vegetated surfaces (natural or build-up)..

This data set is provided as MOD44B and belongs to MODIS collection 6.1.

All data are available with annual temperal reolution, either on tiles of the MODIS sinusoidal grid with 250 m grid resolution or globally on a Climate Modeling Grid (CMG) with 0.5° grid resolution.

Last update of data set at ICDC: July 6, 2023.

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Parameters

Parameters of the global forest cover fraction data set
Name	Unit	Tiles	Global
Forest cover fraction (FCF)	%	x	x
FCF standard deviation	%	x	-
FCF grid cell mean standard deviation	%	-	x
FCF variance within grid cell	1	-	x
Vegetation cover fraction (VCF)	%	x	x
VCF variance within grid cell	1	-	x
Fraction of non-vegetated areas (nVCF)	%	x	x
nVCF variance within grid cell	1	-	x
Number of useful VCF values per grid cell	1	-	x
Quality flag (QF)	1	x	x
Primary QF and its percentage	1	-	x
Secondary QF and its percentage	1	-	x

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Coverage, spatial and temporal resolution

Period and temporal resolution:

2000 - 2022
Yearly

Coverage and spatial resolution:

Global or on tiles with ~10° latitudinal and 10+° longitudinal extent
Spatial resolution: Global: 0.5° x 0.5° (Climate Modeling Grid); tiles: 250 m x 250 m (MODIS sinusoidal grid)
Geographic latitude: Global: 89.75°S to 89.75°N; tiles: depends on tile
Geographic longitude: Global: 179.75°W to 179.75°E; tiles: depends on tile
Dimension: Global: 360 rows x 720 columns; tiles: 4800 rows x 4800 columns for every tile
Altitude: follows topography

Format:

NetCDF

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Data quality

Included in the original (tiled) product are i) a standard deviation of 30 model runs to derive the FCF - which is also valid for the other two fractions - and ii) a quality flag informing about the quality of input data with respect to, e.g., cloud coverage of viewing geometry.

Included in the global gridded product are i) grid-cell means of the above-mentioned standard deviation, ii) variances of the three fractions as a measure of their variability per grid cell, iii) a grid-cell mean quality flag and iv) maps of the primary and secondary quality flags together with their percent fractions (see also the respective attributes in the netCDF files).

Note that in contrast to Collection 6.0 the coverage of the geophyiscal parameters in the high northern latitudes is reduced because of limitations in the retrieval due to too solar radiation and observation incidence angle issues; this applies to tile numbers v0, v1 and v2.

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Contact

J.R.G. Townshend
Department of Geographical Sciences
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
email: jtownshe (at) umd.edu

Stefan Kern
ICDC / CEN / University of Hamburg
E-Mail: stefan.kern (at) uni-hamburg.de

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References

Literature:

Townshend, J., et al., User Guide for the MODIS Vegetation Continuous Fields product Collection 6.1, version 1, https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/documents/1494/MOD44B_User_Guide_V61.pdf (pdf, not barrier-free)
Carroll, M., J. Townsend, M. Hansen, C. DiMiceli, R. Sohlberg, and K. Wurster, 2011. Vegetative Cover Conversion and Vegetation Continuous Fields. In: Ramachandran, B., C. O. Justice, and M. Abrams (eds.), Land Remote Sensing and Global Environment Change: NASA's Earth Observing System and the Science of ASTER and MODIS. Springer Verlag.
Hansen, M., J. Townsend, R. DeFries, and M. Carroll, 2005. Estimation of tree cover using MODIS data at global, continental and regional/local scales. Int. J. Rem. Sens., 26(19), 4359-4380.
Sexton, J. O., et al., 2015. A model for the propagation of uncertainty from continuous estimates of tree cover to categorical forest cover and change. Remote Sensing of Environment, 156(1), 418-425. (pdf, not barrier-free)

Websites:

LP DAAC - MOD44B - Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center - Sioux Falls, SD, https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/mod44bv061/

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Data citation

Please cite the data as follows:

Tiles:

DiMiceli, D., Sohlberg, R., Towsend, J. (2022) MODIS/Terra Vegetation Continuous Fields Yearly L3 Global 250m SIN Grid. NASA LP DAAC. https://doi.org/10.5067/MODIS/MOD44B.061 , last access: June 16 2023, provided with decoded quality flags and per-grid cell latitude / longitude coordinates by the Integrated Climate Data Center (ICDC) at CEN, University of Hamburg, Germany, https://doi.org/10.25592/uhhfdm.11197 .

Global:

Globally gridded MODIS Terra Collection 6.1 yearly forest and vegetation cover fraction at 0.5 degree grid resolution derived at ICDC, https://doi.org/10.25592/uhhfdm.8560 from DiMiceli, D., Sohlberg, R., Towsend, J. (2022) MODIS/Terra Vegetation Continuous Fields Yearly L3 Global 250m SIN Grid. NASA LP DAAC. https://doi.org/10.5067/MODIS/MOD44B.061 , last access: June 16, 2023.

and with the following acknowledgments:

Thanks to ICDC, CEN, University of Hamburg for data support.

License

The data is distributed under the license CC-BY-4.0

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