Source: ESA (European Space Agency), retrieved <a href="http://due.esrin.esa.int/page_globcover.php" target="_blank"> here </a> <br><br>Most of the country is covered with natural and semi-natural vegetation with variable tree density. Vegetation cover is mostly high in the southwest, with thick tropical forests in the Greater Equatoria region, and low in the southeast and north, where semi-arid savannah dominates. Grasslands, aquatic vegetation and open water occupy the wetter regions. A large part of South Sudan is covered by the Sudd swamp, a conglomeration of smaller wetlands.

The 2015 Global Forest Resources Assessment (FRA2015) continues the tradition of seeking to describe the world’s forests – a tradition that began in 1948. The world’s forest 2010 map is a raster product with a pixel size of 250 meters by 250 meters. It was prepared with the following geospatial layers : - Forest cover data from the Vegetation Continuous Fields product (VCF) derived from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor, on-board the Terra and Aqua satellites (Earth Observation System, NASA) with a 250 m spatial resolution (Hansen et al., 2003). - Water data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM, NASA) Water Body Data at 250 m spatial resolution in combination with the MODIS global water mask (Carroll et al., 2009). - Elevation data from the SRTM at 1 km resolution, down-sampled to the 10 million scale. - Country boundaries and coastlines from the Global Administrative Unit Layer (GAUL, 2008) of the FAO. - Global ecological zones (FAO, 2012) References: - Hansen, M., R. DeFries, J.R. Townshend, M. Carroll, C. Dimiceli, and R. Sohlberg, 2003. Vegetation Continuous Fields MOD44B, 2001 Percent Tree Cover, Collection 3, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, 2001. - Carroll, M., Townshend, J., DiMiceli, C., Noojipady, P., Sohlberg, R. 2009. A New Global Raster Water Mask at 250 Meter Resolution. International Journal of Digital Earth. ( volume 2 number 4) - FAO, 2012 Global ecological zones for FAO forest reporting: 2010 Update. Forest resources Assessment Working Paper 179, Rome, 2012.