Fractional vegetation cover (FVC) is an important biophysical parameter of terrestrial ecosystems. Variation of FVC is a major problem in research fields related to remote sensing applications. In this study, the global FVC from 1982 to 2011 was estimated by GIMMS NDVI data, USGS global land cover characteristics data and HWSD soil type data with a modified dimidiate pixel model, which considered vegetation and soil types and mixed pixels decomposition. The evaluation of the robustness and accuracy of the GIMMS FVC with MODIS FVC and Validation of Land European Remote sensing Instruments (VALERI) FVC show high reliability. Trends of the annual FVC_max and FVC_mean datasets in the last 30 years were reported by the Mann–Kendall method and Sen’s slope estimator. The results indicated that global FVC change was 0.20 and 0.60 in a year with obvious seasonal variability. All of the continents in the world experience a change in the annual FVC_max and FVC_mean, which represents biomass production, except for Oceania, which exhibited a significant increase based on a significance level of p = 0.001 with the Student’s t-test. Global annual maximum and mean FVC growth rates are 0.14%/y and 0.12%/y, respectively. The trends of the annual FVC_max and FVC_mean based on pixels also illustrated that the global vegetation had turned green in the last 30 years. A significant trend on the p = 0.05 level was found for 15.36% of the GIMMS FVC_max pixels on a global scale (excluding permanent snow and ice), in which 1.8% exhibited negative trends and 13.56% exhibited positive trends. The GIMMS FVC_mean similarly produced a total of 16.64% significant pixels with 2.28% with a negative trend and 14.36% with a positive trend. The North Frigid Zone represented the highest annual FVC_max significant increase (p = 0.05) of 25.17%, which may be caused mainly by global warming, Arctic sea-ice loss and an advance in growing seasons. Better FVC predictions at large regional scales, with high temporal resolution (month) and long time series, would advance our ability to understand the characteristics of the global FVC changes in the last 30 years and predict the response of vegetation to global climate change.

Fractional vegetation cover (FVC) is an essential parameter for characterizing the land surface vegetation conditions and plays an important role in earth surface process simulations and global change studies. The Sentinel-2 missions carrying multi-spectral instrument (MSI) sensors with 13 multispectral bands are potentially useful for estimating FVC. However, the performance of these bands for FVC estimation is unclear. Therefore, the objective of this study was to assess the performance of Sentinel-2 MSI spectral band reflectances on FVC estimation. The samples, including the Sentinel-2 MSI canopy reflectances and corresponding FVC values, were simulated using the PROSPECT + SAIL radiative transfer model under different conditions, and random forest regression (RFR) method was then used to develop FVC estimation models and assess the performance of various band reflectances for FVC estimation. These models were finally evaluated using field survey data. The results indicate that the three most important bands of Sentinel-2 MSI data for FVC estimation are band 4 (Red), band 12 (SWIR2) and band 8a (NIR2). FVC estimation using these bands has a comparable accuracy (root mean square error (RMSE) = 0.085) with that using all bands (RMSE = 0.090). The results also demonstrate that band 12 had a better performance for FVC estimation than the green band (RMSE = 0.097). However, the newly added red-edge bands, with low scores in the RFR model, have little significance for improving FVC estimation accuracy compared with the Red, NIR2 and SWIR2 bands.

Using remotely sensed satellite products is the most efficient way to monitor global land, water, and forest resource changes, which are believed to be the main factors for understanding global climate change and its impacts. A reliable remotely sensed product should be retrieved quantitatively through models or statistical methods. However, producing global products requires a complex computing system and massive volumes of multi-sensor and multi-temporal remotely sensed data. This manuscript describes the ground Global LAnd Surface Satellite (GLASS) product generation system that can be used to generate long-sequence time series of global land surface data products based on various remotely sensed data. To ensure stabilization and efficiency in running the system, we used the methods of task management, parallelization, and multi I/O channels. An array of GLASS remote sensing products related to global land surface parameters are currently being produced and distributed by the Center for Global Change Data Processing and Analysis at Beijing Normal University in Beijing, China. These products include Leaf Area Index (LAI), land surface albedo, and broadband emissivity (BBE) from the years 1981 to 2010, downward shortwave radiation (DSR) and photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) from the years 2008 to 2010.

Land cover classification data have a very important practical application value, and long time series land cover classification datasets are of great significance studying environmental changes, urban changes, land resource surveys, hydrology and ecology. At present, the starting point of continuous land cover classification products for many years is mostly after the year 2000, and there is a lack of long-term continuously annual land cover classification products before 2000. In this study, a long time series classification data extraction model is established using a bidirectional long-term and short-term memory network (Bi-LSTM). In the model, quantitative remote sensing products combined with DEM, nighttime lighting data, and latitude and longitude elevation data were used. We applied this model in China and obtained China’s 1982–2017 0.05° land cover classification product. The accuracy assessment results of the test data show that the overall accuracy is 84.2% and that the accuracies of wetland, water, glacier, tundra, city and bare soil reach 92.1%, 92.0%, 94.3%, 94.6% and 92.4%, respectively. For the first time, this study used a variety of long time series data, especially quantitative remote sensing products, for the classification of features. At the same time, it also acquired long time series land cover classification products, including those from the year 2000. This study provides new ideas for the establishment of higher-resolution long time series land cover classification products.