Forest Cover Change in Amchang Wildlife Sanctuary, Assam, India

Assam is one of the most forested states in India. These forests support a large number of important species and endemics and have great significance for global efforts in biodiversity conservation. Therefore the need for assessment and monitoring forest cover change has become essential in managing natural resources and observing environmental changes. In this paper an attempt has been made to detect the landuse/landcover changes before and after institutional change (1989-2011) of Amchang Wildlife Sanctuary, Assam. The study was carried out through Remote Sensing and GIS techniques using SOI toposheets and Landsat imagery of 1989 and 2011. The present study has brought out that the water bodies and moderately dense forests decreased sharply during the 22 years period by 17.64% and 50.35% of hectares. On the other hand the dense forest and open forest area increased by 13.35 % and 2% of hectares. Most of the dense forest and moderately dense forest area has converted to open forest and non-forest area. Non-forest area like settlement area has increased to 49.96% of hectares during the 22 years period

A global reference database of crowdsourced cropland data collected using the Geo-Wiki platform

A global reference data set on cropland was collected through a crowdsourcing campaign using the Geo-Wiki crowdsourcing tool. The campaign lasted three weeks, with over 80 participants from around the world reviewing almost 36,000 sample units, focussing on cropland identification. For quality assessment purposes, two additional data sets are provided. The first is a control set of 1,793 sample locations validated by students trained in satellite image interpretation. This data set was used to assess the quality of the crowd as the campaign progressed. The second data set contains 60 expert validations for additional evaluation of the quality of the contributions. All data sets are split into two parts: the first part shows all areas classified as cropland and the second part shows cropland average per location and user. After further processing, the data presented here might be suitable to validate and compare medium and high resolution cropland maps generated using remote sensing. These could also be used to train classification algorithms for developing new maps of land cover and cropland extent

A global reference database of crowdsourced cropland data collected using the Geo-Wiki platform

A global reference dataset on cropland was collected through a crowdsourcing campaign using the Geo-Wiki crowdsourcing tool. The campaign lasted three weeks, with over 80 participants from around the world reviewing almost 36,000 sample units, focussing on cropland identification. For quality assessment purposes, two additional data sets are provided. The first is a control set of 1793 sample locations validated by students trained in satellite image interpretation. This dataset was used to assess the quality of the crowd as the campaign progressed. The second dataset contains 60 expert validations for additional evaluation of contributions quality. All data sets are split into two parts: the first part shows all areas classified as cropland and the second part shows cropland average per location and user. The results of the cropland validation campaign can be used to validate and compare medium and high resolution cropland maps that have been generated using remote sensing. These can also be used to train classification algorithms for developing new maps of land cover and cropland extent.JRC.D.5-Food Securit