A new land cover map for the Mekong: Southeast Asia’s largest transboundary river basin

Kurzfassung

The transboundary Mekong basin, including territorial parts of China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, is endowed with a rich natural resource base. The rapid socio-economic development of the region, however, substantially increases pressure on its natural resources that are increasingly subject of over-exploitation and environmental degradation. Some of the main environmental problems facing the region are common or transboundary issues that only can be addressed by transboundary approaches based on consistent and regional comparable information on the state of the environment at basin scale. In this context, a regional specific land cover map, the MEKONG LC2010 product, was produced for the entire Mekong Basin, utilising information from the MODIS sensor aboard the platforms Aqua and Terra.