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General Project Information
Land Cover Products
Other Land Cover Products
1. General Project Information
Contact: Dr. Eileen H. Helmer, Research Ecologist, International Institute of Tropical Forestry
The Caribbean Vegetation Team conducts remote sensing and landscape ecology research to benefit natural resource sustainability, biodiversity conservation, and disaster management in the Caribbean. Collaborators include scientists from the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) International Institute of Tropical Forestry (IITF), the U.S. Geological Survey EROS Data Center (EDC), The Nature Conservancy, Colorado State University, and leaders and staff from the Forestry, Agriculture or Physical Planning Divisions of each country, including members from the Caribbean Foresters Association. Past work mapped land cover and forest formations for Puerto Rico (Helmer 2004, Helmer et al. 2002), Jamaica and Dominica. Recent work has included a pioneering international effort to map land cover and forest formations of five Caribbean countries with Landsat ETM+ satellite imagery and a consistent, insular Caribbean-wide classification scheme. The classification legend is robust yet extremely relevant to the many natural resource issues that Caribbean islands face. The countries include St. Kitts/Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, St. Lucia, Grenada and Barbados. The Landsat 7 ETM+ images were provided by the NASA Global Observation of Forest Cover Program, EDC, and IITF. Other funding for the five-country project is from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Caribbean Regional Program Office, as well as the USFS-IITF, TNC and EDC. In parallel, IITF has been working to map vegetation and land cover for the U.S. Virgin Islands and for more recent dates in Puerto Rico. Final maps and associated digital data will be available for the Eastern Caribbean countries by early 2006, for Puerto Rico by mid-2006 and for the U.S. Virgin Islands by late 2006.
REFERENCES
KENNAWAY, T., HELMER, E. H. 2007.
The Forest Types and Ages Cleared for Land Development in Puerto Rico
.
HELMER, E. H., RUEFENACHT, B. 2007.
A comparison of radiometric normalization methods when filling cloud gaps in Landsat imagery
.
Can. J. Remote Sensing
Vol. 33, No. 4, pp 325-340.
HELMER, E. H., & RUEFENACHT, B.
Cloud-Free Satellite Image Mosaics with Regression Trees and Histogram Matching
Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing
September 2005: 1079-1089.
HELMER, E. H. 2004.
Forest conservation and land development
in
Puerto Rico
.
Landscape Ecology
19: 29-40.
HELMER, E. H., O. RAMOS, T. D. M. LOPEZ, M. QUIÑONES & W. DIAZ 2002.
Mapping forest types and land cover
of
Puerto Rico
, a component of the Caribbean biodiversity hotspot.
Caribbean J. Sci.
38: 165-183.
2. Land Cover Products
Barbados
Grenada
St. Kitts/Nevis
St. Vincent and the Grenadines
St Lucia
3. Other Land Cover Products
Dominican Republic
Dominica
Historical Caribbean Atlas
