Geoscience Australia Landsat Fractional Cover Percentiles Collection 3

Brief description

The Fractional Cover (Landsat) product, developed by the Joint Remote Sensing Research Program, provides information about the the proportions of: green vegetation non-green vegetation (including deciduous trees during autumn and dry grass) bare areas for every 30m x 30m ground footprint It provides insight into how areas of dry vegetation and/or bare soil and green vegetation are changing over time. It is important to be able to analyse and interpret fractional cover. For example, the 90th percentile of bare soil for a particular year will identify areas that have experienced a high portion of bare soil during that year. This product is designed to make it easier to analyse and interpret fractional cover. It uses the Fractional Cover (Landsat) product and calculates the statistical summaries (10th, 50th and 90th percentile) of fractional cover per epoch (whole-of-archive-summary, annual, seasonal). This product is available in the following forms: FC-PERCENTILE-SUMMARY This contains a (10th, 50th and 90th percentile) of bare, green and non-green vegetation of all observations contained within the Digital Earth Australia (DEA) Fractional Cover time series (from 1987 to the most up to date imagery available). FC-PERCENTILE-ANNUAL-SUMMARY This contains a (10th, 50th and 90th percentile) of bare, green and non-green vegetation of observations acquired in each full calendar year (1st of January - 31st December) from 1987 to the most recent full calendar year. FC-PERCENTILE-SEASONAL-SUMMARY This contains a (10th, 50th and 90th percentile) of bare, green and non-green vegetation of observations acquired within each calendar season (DJF, MAM, JJA, SON). This product is available for the most recent 8 seasons.

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Maintenance and Update Frequency: asNeeded

Statement: Nationally consistent information about fractional cover (FC) dynamics is essential to addressing a range of natural resource challenges. These include land management practices, air quality, soil erosion, rangeland condition and soil carbon dynamics. The fractional cover algorithm was developed by the Joint Remote Sensing Research Program (JRSRP) and is described in Scarth et al. (2010). While originally calibrated in Queensland, a large collaborative effort between The Department of Agriculture - ABARES and State and Territory governments to collect additional calibration data has enabled the calibration to extend to the entire Australian continent. FC was made possible by new scientific and technical capabilities, the collaborative framework established by the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), and collaborative effort between state and Commonwealth governments. The long term acquisition plan supported by the Landsat program, in combination with Geoscience Australia's longstanding investment in the on-ground infrastructure required to capture Landsat imagery has made this product possible. Geoscience Australia's partnership with the National Computing Infrastructure (NCI) facilities in conjunction with the development of the Australian Geoscience Data Cube - a high performance data framework - makes it possible to analyse the continental archive of fractional cover data. FC-PERCENTILE provides a consistent summary of fractional cover which will be an important foundation for land cover mapping and monitoring across Australia. It is a resource for natural resource managers, land surface process modellers, carbon modellers, rangeland managers, ecosystem scientists and policy makers.

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Purpose
This product provides valuable information for a range of environmental and agricultural applications, including: - soil erosion monitoring - land surface process modelling - land management practices (e.g. crop rotation, stubble management, rangeland management) - vegetation studies - fuel load estimation - ecosystem modelling