Spatial uncertainty in estimates of the areal extent of land cover types

摘要

This paper presents a geostatistical method to model spatial uncertainty in estimates of the areal extent of land cover types. The area estimates are based on exhaustive but uncertain (soft) remotely sensed data and a sample of (hard) reference data. The method requires a set of mutually exclusive and exhaustive land cover classes. Land cover regions should be larger than the pixels' ground resolution cells. Using sequential indicator simulation a set of equally probable maps are generated from which uncertainties regarding land cover phenomena are inferred. Ordinary collocated indicator co-kriging, the geostatistical estimation method employed, explicitly accounts for the spatial cross-correlation between hard and soft data using a simplified model of coregionalisation. The method is illustrated by predicting the areal extent of a contiguous olive region around a given point in a study area in southern Spain.