|
|
National Land-Cover Database Project
The National Land-Cover Database Project , has been undertaken by the CSIR and the Agricultural Research Council, and sponsored by the Department of Agriculture, Department of Environment Affairs and Tourism, Department of Water Affairs and Forestry and the South African National Defence Force. It has produced land-cover data for all of South Africa, Swaziland and Lesotho derived from LANDSAT TM satellite imagery. This data was collected over the period 1994-1996 and was mapped directly from a series of 1:250 000 scale, geo-referenced Landsat TM Spacemaps.
|
Land-Cover versus Land-Use
Although land-cover and land-use are somewhat related, they are different.
- Land-cover refers to all the natural and man-made features that cover the earth's immediate material surface.
- Land-use refers to the human activity that is associated with a specific land unit.
There can only be one land-cover type associated with a point on the ground, but this may be associated with several land-uses for example, a grassland may be used for communal grazing within a conservancy area.
|
Catchment Land-Cover
The nature and extent of land-cover in the catchments of 62 estuaries was determined using data collected by the NLC. Because of the scale at which the original data were captured (1:250 000), only those estuaries with relatively large catchments (mostly >500 km2) were assessed.
For each estuary, a catchment map (and pie graph) is presented depicting the distribution, nature and extent of land-cover divided into four general land-cover categories:
- Agriculture
- Degraded
- Natural
- Urban
Additional catchment maps are also presented portraying the distribution, nature and extent of each contributing land-cover class to each generalised category.
|
