This paper assesses the potentiality of certainty factor models (CF) for the best suitable causative factors extraction for landslide susceptibility mapping in the Sado Island, Niigata Prefecture, Japan. To test the applicability of CF, a landslide inventory map provided by National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention (NIED) was split into two subsets: (i) 70% of the landslides in the inventory to be used for building the CF based model; (ii) 30% of the landslides to be used for the validation purpose. A spatial database with fifteen landslide causative factors was then constructed by processing ALOS satellite images, aerial photos, topographical and geological maps. CF model was then applied to select the best subset from the fifteen factors. Using all fifteen factors and the best subset factors, landslide susceptibility maps were produced using statistical index (SI) and logistic regression (LR) models. The susceptibility maps were validated and compared using landslide locations in the validation data. The prediction performance of two susceptibility maps was estimated using the Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC). The result shows that the area under the ROC curve (AUC) for the LR model (AUC = 0.817) is slightly higher than those obtained from the SI model (AUC = 0.801). Further, it is noted that the SI and LR models using the best subset outperform the models using the fifteen original factors. Therefore, we conclude that the optimized factor model using CF is more accurate in predicting landslide susceptibility and obtaining a more homogeneous classification map. Our findings acknowledge that in the mountainous regions suffering from data scarcity, it is possible to select key factors related to landslide occurrence based on the CF models in a GIS platform. Hence, the development of a scenario for future planning of risk mitigation is achieved in an efficient manner.

Fractional vegetation cover (FVC) plays an important role in earth surface process simulations, climate modeling, and global change studies. Several global FVC products have been generated using medium spatial resolution satellite data. However, the validation results indicate inconsistencies, as well as spatial and temporal discontinuities of the current FVC products. The objective of this paper is to develop a reliable estimation algorithm to operationally produce a high-quality global FVC product from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) surface reflectance. The high-spatial-resolution FVC data were first generated using Landsat TM/ETM+ data at the global sampling locations, and then, the general regression neural networks (GRNNs) were trained using the high-spatial-resolution FVC data and the reprocessed MODIS surface reflectance data. The direct validation using ground reference data from validation of land European Remote Sensing instruments sites indicated that the performance of the proposed method (R ² =0.809, RMSE =0.157) was comparable with that of the GEOV1 FVC product (R ² =0.775, RMSE =0.166), which is currently considered to be the best global FVC product from SPOT VEGETATION data. Further comparison indicated that the spatial and temporal continuity of the estimates from the proposed method was superior to that of the GEOV1 FVC product.

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.

Temporal-related features are important for improving land cover classification accuracy using remote sensing data. This study investigated the efficacy of phenological features extracted from time series MODIS Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data in improving the land cover classification accuracy of Landsat data. The MODIS NDVI data were first fused with Landsat data via the Spatial and Temporal Adaptive Reflectance Fusion Model (STARFM) algorithm to obtain NDVI data at the Landsat spatial resolution. Next, phenological features, including the beginning and ending dates of the growing season, the length of the growing season, seasonal amplitude, and the maximum fitted NDVI value, were extracted from the fused time series NDVI data using the TIMESAT tool. The extracted data were integrated with the spectral data of the Landsat data to improve classification accuracy using a maximum likelihood classifier (MLC) and support vector machine (SVM) classifier. The results indicated that phenological features had a statistically significant effect on improving the land cover classification accuracy of single Landsat data (an approximately 3% increase in overall classification accuracy), especially for vegetation type discrimination. However, the phenological features did not improve on statistical measures including the maximum, the minimum, the mean, and the standard deviation values of the time series NDVI dataset, especially for human-managed vegetation types. Regarding different classifiers, SVM could achieve better classification accuracy than the traditional MLC classifier, but the improvement in accuracy obtained using advanced classifiers was inferior to that achieved by involving the temporally derived features for land cover classification.