BARBADOS LAND COVER v2

Land cover map of Barbados. Forest formation and land cover maps for several Caribbean islands were developed from satellite imagery as part of a multi-organizational project. For the map of Barbados (Helmer et al., 2008), we used decision tree software as the original approach to classify Landsat ETM+ images. Unfortunately the high cloud cover in the available Landsat images led to a low-quality classified map in many areas. Ikonos images for the years 2001 and 2002 where obtained and used as the basis to classify most of the island by "heads-up" digitizing. The forest classification scheme relates closely to that of Areces-Malea et al. (Areces-Mallea et al., 1999), with modifications similar to those in Helmer et al. (Helmer et al., 2002). This is version 2 of the Barbados map. In this version, the high resolution imagery viewable on Google Earth was used to interpret land cover in areas that were cloud-obscured in the original map and imagery. In addition, a projection problem was corrected. Citation: Helmer, E.H.; Kennaway, T.A.; Pedreros, D.H.; Clark, M.L.; Marcano-Vega, H.; Tieszen, L.L., Ruzycki, T.R.; Schill, S.R.; Carrington, C.M.S. 2008. Land cover and forest formation distributions for St. Kitts, Nevis, St. Eustatius, Grenada and Barbados from decision tree classification of cloud-cleared satellite imagery. Caribbean Journal of Science. 44(2):175-198. Data are posted at the FSGeodata Clearinghouse (https://data.fs.usda.gov/geodata/).