A spatio-temporal land use/land cover reconstruction for India (1960--2010), Version 0.1

In recent decades India has undergone substantial land use/land cover change as a result of population growth and economic development. Historical land use/land cover maps are necessary to quantify the impact of change at global and regional scales, improve predictions about the quantity and location of future change and support planning decisions. Here, a regional land change model driven by district-level inventory data is used to generate an annual time series of high-resolution land use/land cover maps for the Indian subcontinent between 1960-2010. The allocation procedure is based on statistical analysis of the relationship between contemporary land use/land cover and various spatially explicit covariates, with the derived statistical models used to predict the suitability of individual pixels to the respective land use/land cover types. A comparison of the simulated map for 1985 against remotely-sensed land use/land cover maps for 1985 and 2005 reveals substantial disagreement between the simulated and remote sensing maps, much of which arises due to differences in the amount of change aggregated to the country level.