The Significance and Sustainability of Charcoal Production in the ...

used to form standardized land cover classes and to create own land cover legend compliant
to the FAO – UNEP international standard. In order to define meaningful and descriptive
classes that will fully capture the land cover with the LCCS the user must have good a priori
knowledge of the actual land cover occurring on the ground in the area to be classified (Clark
2007: 1). Applied classification scheme depends on the purpose of the land cover
classification, in this case, the main mapping object were the remaining forest and woodland
areas, so they are taken in to consideration in the classification. After deciding the land cover
classes for Dakatcha Woodland in the supervised classification process it was possible to
compile a coherent legend in the LCCS software (Table 3). Because the user defined class
names do not tell the classifiers as such, the LCCS code and Boolean formula should always
be given along with the user defined land cover names when reporting geographical mapping
data produced using the LCCS nomenclature (Clark 2007: 7).
Table 3. LCCS legend for Dakatcha Woodland area
LCCS Boolean Formula
ID User Land Cover Name LCCS Code (Classifiers) User Description
1 Water 7015-5 A1B1C2D2-A5 Permanent water bodies.
Woodland closed >65%
Dense woodland with brachystegia
2 (brachystegia type) 20096 A3A10B2C1D1E1 as dominant species.
Woodland open 40-15%
Sparse woodland with brachystegia
3 (brachystegia type) 20138-3012 A3A11B2C1D1E1-A13 as dominant species.
Sparse to dense woodland with mixed
4 Woody vegeration 20138-1 A3A11B2C1D1E1-A12 tree species.
Thicket (cynometra
Dense thicket with cynometra as
5 type) 20159-12374 A4A10B3C1D1E1-B14 dominant species.
6 Bushland 20180-13476 A4A11B3C1D1E1-B9 Mainly riverine bushland areas.
Agricultural lands with several crops
(maize, legumes, fruit trees,
7 Agriculture 1 11391 A4XXXXC2D1 pineapples, etc.).
8 Agriculture 2 11393 A4XXXXC2D1D8 Agricultural lands mainly on fallow.
9 Grassland 20209-12212 A6A11B4C1E5-B12 Natural grasslands.
For instance, bare rock in depression
areas and bare soil on the roads and
10 Bare areas 6001 A1
towns.
Final land cover output was exported from ERDAS IMAGINE to an ESRI GRID format to
allow further processing in ArcGIS environment. Image file was subset in ERDAS IMAGINE
to cover the Dakatcha Woodland area after which it was converted to ArcCoverage and
exported to shapefile. Relevant shapefiles such as roads, rivers and water bodies, eco-tourism
sites and could then be overlaid on the classification GRID to produce final maps.
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