Digital Earth Africa Fractional Cover: Landsat-Based Vegetation and Soil Analysis

Fractional Cover data derived from Landsat satellite scenes estimates coverage by green vegetation, non-green vegetation, and bare soil. The service includes daily scene-based measurements and annual summaries providing 10th, 50th, and 90th percentiles for each cover type per calendar year. Digital Earth Africa provides this data under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.

Use Cases

• Monitoring year-to-year land cover changes based on annual percentile summaries.
• Studying dynamic vegetation processes based on scene-based fractional cover measurements.
• Characterizing the proportion of bare soil, dry, and green vegetation in a landscape.
• Analyzing trends in dry vegetation and bare soil coverage over time.

Strengths

• Provides two complementary data components: daily scene-based estimates and annual percentile summaries.
• Derived from Landsat satellite data using an algorithm developed by the Joint Remote Sensing Research Program.
• Annual percentiles (10th, 50th, 90th) provide robust estimates of low, median, and high proportion values for each cover type.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count, file formats, and data size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

Digital Earth Africa

Collection Method

Derived from Landsat satellite data using an algorithm from the Joint Remote Sensing Research Program.

Time Range

Annual summaries cover each calendar year. Scene-based data provides daily measurements.

Freshness

Annual summaries cover each calendar year (January 1st to December 31st).

Geography

Covers the African continent.