What proportion of the 240m area sensed by MODIS must be forest before it is defined as forest?

Question

MOD12 is a MODIS product at 240m resolution. Landsat produces 30m resolution products, which I resampled to 240m resulting in a raster of proportion forest cover in each 240m pixel (based on the mean of the 8x30m cells it covers). The MOD12 raster has been reclassed to binary forest/non-forest.

My question is: what proportion of the 240m area sensed by MODIS must be forest before it is defined as forest? Is it majority (50%+) or something more complex? My reason for wanting to know this is to reclass the Landsat proportional raster to a binary raster that mirrors the MOD12 data.

Answer 1

All of the detailed information about MOD12 data can be found in the Algorithm Theoretical Basis Document (ATBD). On page 23, it says that the forest classes require >60% coverage of the pixel.