Evaluating the use of publicly available remotely sensed land cover data for areal interpolation

Areal interpolation is used to transfer attribute data between geographically incongruous zonal systems. Remotely sensed land cover data are widely used in intelligent areal interpolation methods to solve this problem. This article examines the usefulness of different publicly available remotely sensed land cover data sets as ancillary data used in conjunction with different areal interpolation methods. Two land cover data sets were compiled at the national scale; one by the Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics Consortium (the National Land Cover Dataset or NLCD) and one by the Coastal Change Analysis Program. A third land cover data set was compiled at a regional scale for the state of Connecticut by the Center for Land Use Education and Research. Results show that for areal interpolation, greater detail in the classification of developed areas was important whether the data were developed for use at a national or a regional scale. Even more important is the further enhancement of remotely sensed land use categories by incorporating local road or parcel data layers. The worst performing interpolation method using enhanced remote sensing-derived land cover data produced more accurate results than the best performing method using only the original land cover data. The results also show that parcels produce better enhancements than road buffers because they remove the areas of the roads themselves from population consideration.