Land cover map of the Ethiopian Blue Nile River Basin

This dataset is a land cover map of the Ethiopian portion of the Blue Nile Basin, called the Abay Basin in Ethiopia. It was generated using remotely sensed data to classify land cover into eight broad classes: agriculture, grassland, woodland/shrub, forest, bare ground, urban/impervious surfaces, water, and seasonal water/marsh areas. We used data from Landsat spectral bands from 2000 to 2011, the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and its temporal mean and variance, together with a digital elevation model, all at 30-m spatial resolution, as inputs to a supervised classifier. A Support Vector Machines algorithm (SVM) was chosen to deal with the size, variability and non-parametric nature of these data stacks. In post-processing, an image segmentation algorithm with a minimum mapping unit of about 0.5 hectares was used to convert per pixel classification results into an object based final map. (2018-08)