Thematic Comparison between ESA WorldCover 2020 Land Cover Product and a National Land Use Land Cover Map

Diogo Duarte (), Cidália Fonte, Hugo Costa and Mário Caetano
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Diogo Duarte: Institute for Systems Engineering and Computers at Coimbra (INESC Coimbra), DEEC, University of Coimbra, Polo 2, 3030-290 Coimbra, Portugal
Cidália Fonte: Institute for Systems Engineering and Computers at Coimbra (INESC Coimbra), DEEC, University of Coimbra, Polo 2, 3030-290 Coimbra, Portugal
Hugo Costa: Direção-Geral do Território, Rua da Artilharia Um, 107, 1099-052 Lisbon, Portugal
Mário Caetano: Direção-Geral do Território, Rua da Artilharia Um, 107, 1099-052 Lisbon, Portugal

Land, 2023, vol. 12, issue 2, 1-16

Abstract: This work presents a comparison between a global and a national land cover map, namely the ESA WorldCover 2020 (WC20) and the Portuguese use/land cover map (Carta de Uso e Ocupação do Solo 2018) (COS18). Such a comparison is relevant given the current amount of publicly available LULC products (either national or global) where such comparative studies enable a better understanding regarding different sets of LULC information and their production, focus and characteristics, especially when comparing authoritative maps built by national mapping agencies and global land cover focused products. Moreover, this comparison is also aimed at complementing the global validation report released with the WC20 product, which focused on global and continental level accuracy assessments, with no additional information for specific countries. The maps were compared by following a framework composed by four steps: (1) class nomenclature harmonization, (2) computing cross-tabulation matrices between WC20 and the Portuguese map, (3) determining the area occupied by each harmonized class in each data source, and (4) visual comparison between the maps to illustrate their differences focusing on Portuguese landscape details. Some of the differences were due to the different minimum mapping unit ofCOS18 and WC20, different nomenclatures and focuses on either land use or land cover. Overall, the results show that while WC20 detail is able to distinguish small occurrences of artificial surfaces and grasslands within an urban environment, WC20 is often not able to distinguish sparse/individual trees from the neighboring cover, which is a common occurrence in the Portuguese landscape. While selecting a map, users should be aware that differences between maps can have a range of causes, such as scale, temporal reference, nomenclature and errors.

Keywords: land use land cover; ESA WorldCover; Portuguese authoritative thematic data; Portugal; map comparison (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 Q2 Q24 Q28 Q5 R14 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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