Comparison and Evaluation of Five Global Land Cover Products on the Tibetan Plateau

Yongjie Pan, Danyun Wang (), Xia Li, Yong Liu and He Huang
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Yongjie Pan: Key Laboratory of Land Surface Process and Climate Change in Cold and Arid Regions, Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou 730000, China
Danyun Wang: Tianjin Meteorological Disaster Defense Technology Centre, Tianjin 300074, China
Xia Li: Key Laboratory of Land Surface Process and Climate Change in Cold and Arid Regions, Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou 730000, China
Yong Liu: Tianjin Meteorological Disaster Defense Technology Centre, Tianjin 300074, China
He Huang: Tianjin Climate Center, Tianjin 300074, China

Land, 2024, vol. 13, issue 4, 1-23

Abstract: The Tibetan Plateau (TP) region contains maximal alpine grassland ecology at the mid-latitudes. This region is also recognized as an ecologically fragile and sensitive area under the effects of global warming. Regional climate modeling and ecosystem research depend on accurate land cover (LC) information. In order to obtain accurate LC information over the TP, the reliability and precision of five moderate/high-resolution LC products (MCD12Q1, C3S-LC, GlobeLand30, GLC_FCS30, and ESA2020 in 2020) were analyzed and evaluated in this study. The different LC products were compared with each other in terms of areal/spatial consistency and assessed with four reference sample datasets (Geo-Wiki, GLCVSS, GOFC-GOLD, and USGS) using the confusion matrix method for accuracy evaluation over the TP. Based on the paired comparison of these five LC datasets, all five LC products show that grass is the major land cover type on the TP, but the range of grass coverage identified by the different products varies noticeably, from 43.35% to 65.49%. The fully consistent spatial regions account for 43.72% of the entire region of the TP, while, in the transition area between grass and bare soil, there is still a large area of medium-to-low consistency. In addition, a comparison of LC datasets using integrated reference datasets shows that the overall accuracies of MCD12Q1, C3S-LC, GlobeLand30, GLC_FCS30, and ESA2020 are 54.29%, 49.32%, 53.03%, 53.73%, and 60.11%, respectively. The producer accuracy of the five products is highest for grass, while glaciers have the most reliable and accurate characteristics among all LC products for users. These findings provide valuable insights for the selection of rational and appropriate LC datasets for studying land-atmosphere interactions and promoting ecological preservation in the TP.

Keywords: land cover; multi-source datasets; spatial consistency; accuracy assessment; Tibetan Plateau (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 Q2 Q24 Q28 Q5 R14 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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