Global Land Cover Datasets
Vegetation
This page provides access to and describes the GISS dataset "Global Distribution of Vegetation at 1°×1° Resolution", which distinguishes 32 vegetation types. In combination with the Cultivation Intensity dataset, it may be used to calculate land cover.
Available Information
Items which you may download here are:
- Dataset (25 kb, gzipped ASCII)
- Sample GIF image (14 kb)
- Sample Postscript image (48 kb, gzipped ASCII)
Explanation of Arrays
The contents of INFO1, INFO2, and INFO3 are:
GLOBAL VEGETATION TYPES DIMENSION = 360 X 180 SCALE = 1 OCEAN = -9999 UNDEF = 99999 MIN = 1 MAX = 31 NUMREC = 6483 (NUMBER OF RECORDS IN DATA FILE)
The possible values of the elements in IARRAY are:
- tropical evergreen rainforest
- trop/subtropical evergreen seasonal broad-leaved forest
- subtropical evergreen rainforest
- temperate/subpolar evergreen rainforest
- temperate evergreen seasonal broadleaved forest, summer rain
- evergreen broadleaved sclerophyllous forest, winter rain
- tropical/subtropical evergreen needle-leaved forest
- temperate/subpolar evergreen needle-leaved forest
- tropical/subtropical drought-deciduous forest
- cold-deciduous forest, with evergreens
- cold-deciduous forest, without evergreens
- xeromorphic forest/woodland
- evergreen broadleaved sclerophyllous woodland
- evergreen needle-leaved woodland
- tropical/subtropical drought-deciduous woodland
- cold-deciduous woodland
- evergreen broadleaved shrubland/thick, evergreen dwarf-shrubland
- evergreen needle-leaved or microphyllous shrubland/thicket
- drought-deciduous shrubland/thicket
- cold-deciduous subalpine/subpolar shrubland/dwarf shrub
- xeromorphic shrubland/dwarf shrubland
- arctic/alpine tundra, mossy bog
- tall/medium/short grassland, 10-40% woody cover
- tall/medium/short grassland, < 10% woody cover
- tall/medium/short grassland, shrub cover
- tall grassland, no woody cover
- medium grassland, no woody cover
- meadow, short grassland, no woody cover
- forb formations
- desert
- ice
- cultivation
References
- Matthews, E. 1983. Global vegetation and land cover: New high-resolution data bases for climate studies. J. Clim. Appl. Meteor. 22, 474-487.
- Matthews, E. 1984. Prescription of Land-surface Boundary Conditions in GISS GCM II: A Simple Method Based on High-resolution Vegetation Data Sets. NASA TM-86096. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Washington, D.C.