A new vegetation map for Qinghai-Tibet Plateau by integrated classification from multi-source data products

In this study, a vegetation classification system for the vegetation types in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau was designed．The integrated classification method, taken into account of multi-source vegetation classification / land cover classification products, was used to produce the actual vegetation map．This integrated classification method followed the principle of data consistency, and the resultant vegetation map was superior over other vegetation maps in terms of reflection of current situation, classification system, and classification accuracy．This vegetation map is timely and could better reflect current vegetation distribution than earlier ones．This vegetation map could be conducive to fully extract vegetation information from multi-source data products with high reliability and consistency．Compared with previous data products, the overall accuracy (78.09%, kappa coefficient is 0.75) of this new vegetation map was found to increase by 18.84%-37.17%, especially for grassland and shrub．