Experiences in Field Data Collection

Abstract

Researchers and practitioners in the land use and land cover change (LUCC) community are often confronted with the need to prepare field expeditions to acquire data necessary to calibrate and validate processes associated with mapping areas/regions. As LUCC becomes more important for strategies aimed at planning for sustainable development, information related to the biophysical condition of the earth’s surface (land cover) and the purpose for which the land is being used (land use) are critical for the correct interpretation of land surface observations obtained from airborne and space borne instruments. In the process of defining a monitoring system for LUCC to support the implementation of sustainable development policies, several questions, must be addressed, for example, what constitutes an appropriate data collection approach for the purposes of forest cover classification? What is the relative importance of canopy understorey information? How can direct ground observations be linked to observations from remote sensing platforms?