Global Natural and Planted Forests Mapping at Fine Spatial Resolution of 30 m

The expansion of planted forests often encroaches upon natural forests, leading to numerous environmental and social problems. Mapping natural and planted forests is crucial for the monitoring, management, and conservation of these invaluable forest resources. However, global mapping of natural and planted forests at fine spatial resolution remains an unaddressed need. Here, we generated more than 70 million training samples from dense Landsat images and fed them to a random forest classifier (RF). Our dataset achieved an impressive overall accuracy of 85% when validated against reference data.