Bare Ground Percent - Provisional Remote Sensing Shrub/Grass NLCD Products for the Montona/Wyoming Study Area

Accurate and consistent estimates of shrubland ecosystem components are crucial to a better understanding of ecosystems condition in arid and semiarid lands. We developed an innovative approach by integrating multiple information to quantify shrubland components as continuous field products within the National Land Cover Database (NLCD). The approach consists of five major parts: field sample collection, high-resolution mapping of shrubland components using WorldView-3 imagery and regression tree models, Landsat 8 radiometric balancing and phenological mosaicking, coarse resolution estimate of shrubland components across a large geographic extent using Landsat 8 phenological mosaics and regression tree models, and product validation. [...]