Land cover of Mauritius Island
In this digital era, high-resolution imagery offers a rapid and inexpensive means of monitoring land use changes. Digitally monitoring dynamic landscape change is a versatile way of facilitating rapid strategic decision making in a sustainable manner in a world of increasing complexity. Whilst a cadastral land information system is useful as a database, its use is limited for research purposes involving the manipulation of images – such as in studying flood-prone areas or land erosion susceptibility. In this paper, we report a land cover map for Mauritius Island (1859 km2), in the Indian Ocean, at a scale of 1:100,000 (A1-size paper). Inputs used to create the map are a SPOT satellite image, published map series at 1:25,000 scale, and selected ground truth surveys for validation. In total, 11 feature types, which are representative of the island's surface cover, have been mapped.
