National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Global Land Cover Datasets

Wetlands Ecosystems

This page provides access to and describes the GISS dataset "Global Distribution of Wetland Ecosystems at 1°×1° Resolution", which distinguishes five classes. In combination with the Fractional Inundation dataset, it may be used to calculate wetland areas.

Available Information

Items which you may download here are:

• Dataset (17 kb, gzipped ASCII)
• Sample GIF image
• Sample Postscript image (32 kb, gzipped ASCII)

Explanation of Arrays

The contents of INFO1, INFO2, and INFO3 are:

DISTRIBUTION OF WETLAND ECOSYSTEMS      DIMENSION = 360 X 180   SCALE = 1
OCEAN =   -9999     UNDEF =   99999     MIN =       1 MAX =       5
NUMREC = 6483 (NUMBER OF RECORDS IN DATA FILE)

The possible values of the elements in IARRAY are:

1. forested bog
2. non-forested bog
3. forested swamp
4. nonforested swamp
5. alluvial formations

References

• Matthews, E., and I. Fung 1987. Methane emission from natural wetlands: Global distribution, area, and environmental characteristics of sources. Global Biogeochem. Cycles 1, 61-86.
• Matthews, E. 1989. Global Data Bases on Distribution, Characteristics and Methane Emission of Natural Wetlands: Documentation of Archived Data Tape. NASA TM-4153. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Washington, D.C..

• Return to Global Land Cover Datasets