Land cover

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Land cover is the physical material on the surface of the earth . Land cover includes u. a. Grass , trees , bare rock , water as well as sealed settlement and traffic areas . Erdbedeckung ( English earth cover is) the expression of the environmentalist Frederick Edward Clements used and the next equivalent of today's vegetation is. This term continues to be used by the US Bureau of Land Management .

There are two different ways to collect information about land cover: field research and analysis of data from remote sensing .

One of the biggest problems with comparing studies is the use of different definitions for identically or similarly named categories. For example, there are many different definitions of “ forest ”, sometimes even within the same organization, which include a multitude of different attributes (such as trunk size or growth rate). Areas with no trees in the UK and Ireland can also be classified as forest cover if the intention is to create new forest there, while in Norway and Finland areas with trees may not qualify as forest if the trees do not grow quickly enough. According to a study published in the journal Nature in 2018, the area covered by forest in the tropics continued to decrease significantly between 1982 and 2016, while the total number of trees in the global total increased by 2.24 million square kilometers (7.1 percent); Bare land in the agricultural areas of Asia has been reduced. The increasing tree cover says nothing about the ecological quality of the forests and little about the actual forest destruction; tree plantations, for example, are included. Arid and semi-arid ecosystems lost vegetation cover, and in mountainous areas the land cover with forest increased. The states of Latin America should be mentioned with the greater losses in the southern hemisphere compared to the tree cover in the northern hemisphere, in Brazil an area of ​​385,000 km 2 disappeared .

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Makers of American Botany, Harry Baker Humphrey, Ronald Press Company, Library of Congress Card Number 61-18435
  2. ^ "Susitna MOA Earth Cover Classification" Bureau of Land Management
  3. ^ Fisher, 2005
  4. ↑ More trees in the northern hemisphere , Spiegel online, August 9, 2018.