Contribution to the Development of Global Land Related Dataset from Asia

Global land related datasets such as land use, land cover, vegetation cover percentage, forest cover percentage, are part of important global geospatial environmental datasets for global change studies. Since land cover varies place by place, continental production of dataset is a usual approach. Western academically developed countries have some projects to describe land cover related information in digital form using remote sensing technology in African, American continent and Oceania. In this paper, the author introduce his initiative to coordinate Asian scientists in order to develop land related dataset of Asia for our better understanding of the environment of Asia and for contribution to the development of global dataset. This paper explains activities by Land Cover Working Group (LCWG) of the Asian Association on Remote Sensing(AARS), Data and Information System(DIS) sub-committee of Japan national committee for the International Geosphere and Biosphere Program(IGBP), and the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing(ISPRS) Working Group IV/6 on Global databases supporting environmental monitoring.