In this study, separate test and training data sets from two different geographical areas and two different sensors—multispectral Landsat ETM+ and hyperspectral DAIS—are used to evaluate the performance of univariate and multivariate DTs for land cover classification. Factors considered are: the effects of variations in training data set size and of the dimensionality of the feature space, together with the impact of boosting, attribute selection measures, and pruning. The level of classification accuracy achieved by the DT is compared to results from back-propagating ANN and the ML classifiers. Our results indicate that the performance of the univariate DT is acceptably good in comparison with that of other classifiers, except with high-dimensional data. Classification accuracy increases linearly with training data set size to a limit of 300 pixels per class in this case. Multivariate DTs do not appear to perform better than univariate DTs. While boosting produces an increase in classification accuracy of between 3% and 6%, the use of attribute selection methods does not appear to be justified in terms of accuracy increases. However, neither the univariate DT nor the multivariate DT performed as well as the ANN or ML classifiers with high-dimensional data.