GLC-STATISTICS: A WEB-BASED SPATIAL STATISTICS SYSTEM FOR GLOBAL LAND COVER DATA

Abstract. Land cover data is one of the principle sources to understand changes of the earth, develop sustainable globe, conduct environment change studies, land source management, and many other societal benefit areas. Globeland30 is the first multi-temporal (for years 2000 and 2010) global land cover datasets at 30-meter resolution. Based on this dataset, an online geo-statistical system has been developed named “GlobeLand30 GSA”. It helps users from different technical expertise backgrounds to visually explore and quantitatively analyse global land cover data. Different from other Web geoprocessing services and applications or desktop GIS software, this system has developed algorithms to correct multi-type errors in computing global land cover statistics, and applied optimal strategies of pre-organizing geography and auxiliary datasets in order to provide rapid response to multiple co-occurrence user-requests. This paper presents the system architecture and the developed data processing strategies, and also the related accuracy and efficiency assessment of GlobeLand30 GSA. The result shows that the system can provide accurate and efficient land cover statistical analysis for various size and shape of user requested areas, and is capable of handling as much as 200 concurrent user-requests with reasonable response time using a low-end desktop computer system environment.