The Land Use Land Cover Viewer is an online visualization tool that enables users to view land use land cover maps. The maps were developed under the Land Cover Mapping for Green House Gas (GHG) Inventories project, which sought to enable SERVIR Eastern and Southern Africa countries to have data to report on GHG inventories as required by UNFCCC. The countries for which land cover maps are available are Malawi, Rwanda, Zambia, Namibia, Botswana, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Lesotho. The viewer has maps for all nine countries for different epochs. Each country for each epoch has four to six maps based on two different classifications: country-specific and EPA. In addition to the viewer having the basic online map elements (legend, zoom, etc.), it has statistics modules that display the basic statistics of the displayed map based on a selection by the user.
Following development of the land cover maps, a dissemination workshop was done for each country to create awareness on the availability and access of the maps. However, the countries lacked a proper platform from which a wider audience and the general public would view and obtain the data. Only those who attended the dissemination workshops would get copies of the data. To alleviate this problem, RCMRD/SERVIR Eastern and Southern Africa decided to develop the online land cover viewer. All the developed maps for all the countries would be uploaded to the viewer, and users would also be able to download the data sets in addition to viewing basic statistics from the countries.
The land cover viewer consists of a Statistics module that displays the basic country's statistics in a graph. This allows for more information about the selected country's land cover that cannot be estimated by simply viewing the map. Each class of land cover is quantified as a percentage, and one can assess the land cover type covering the largest or smallest area of a country.