New land cover data for The Republic of Sudan

The development of the 2020 national land cover map of The Republic of Sudan is an important step towards the REDD+ readiness as well as Sudan’s Forest Monitoring System (SFMS). The 2020 land cover map has been developed using 10 m spatial resolution, open-source satellite data, employing an object-based classification approach. The processing was implemented in the Google Earth Engine (GEE), cloud computing environment using 10 m spatial resolution Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data. Use of GEE leverages the use of terabytes of satellite imagery and geospatial datasets. The workflow is mostly reproducible and based on the use of open-source software/platforms (e.g., R, SEPAL, etc.). The methodological approach for land cover mapping takes into consideration the time constraint of the project and comparative advantage and respective technical expertise of FAO and Forests National Corporation (FNC). Descriptions of the legend classes were translated using the land cover classification system (LCCS v3) – an implementation tool of the ISO standard (ISO 19144-2) Land Cover Meta Language (LCML).

More about the app here: https://data.apps.fao.org/?lang=en&share=f-e0f8eb28-5491-4f5d-bda7-92c3ab86e030