UPP Assistant Professor Mehdi Heris’s recent paper was published in the Journal of Remote Sensing. In this paper, Prof. Heris and his co-authors assessed the accuracy of the Tree Cover layer of the National Land Cover Dataset. Many researchers use this dataset for various purposes, such as understanding how trees mitigate urban heat, improve air quality, and help with stormwater management.
The research shows that National Land Cover Dataset underestimates tree cover in cities by about nine percent. He and his co-authors also offer a new predictive model that can improve the accuracy of this dataset by about three percent. This article suggests paths forward for improving the quality of urban environmental models that require tree canopy data as key model input.
This article is open access and is available here.