Monitoring land cover change detection with NOAA-AVHRR and MODIS remotely sensed data in the North and West of Africa from 1982 to 2015

Mapping land cover changes (LCC) cover three decades over North and West Africa regions provides critical insights for the climate research that inspects the land-atmosphere interaction. LCC is a serious problem in the Earth science domain for this impacts the regional climate by modifying the distribution of terrestrial carbon stocking and roughness of the Earth’s surface. In this study, the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) generated from advanced very high resolution radiometer (AVHRR) was used to produce a continuous set of annual land cover (LC) maps of land cover over North and West Africa between 1982 and 2015, based on the random forest classification. We used the MODIS land cover product (MCD12Q1) as a reference data for training the classifier. The result has validated using annual LC maps listed by time series and the spatio-temporal dynamics of land cover has illustrated over the last three decades. The comparison with Google Earth image 2015 shows that the overall accuracy of the simpler nine-class type of our land cover 2015 map is 76% and 2% higher than that of the MODIS map of the same year. The detection of changes indicated that over the last three decades, the urban and built-up, barren or sparsely vegetated, savannas and deciduous broadleaf forest have increased; in contrast, the open shrublands, woody savannas and water bodies have decreased.