Comparisons of three recent moderate resolution African land cover datasets: CGLS-LC100, ESA-S2-LC20, and FROM-GLC-Africa30

Abstract

© 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Accurate and up-to-date land use land cover (LULC) mapping has long been a challenge in Africa. Recently, three LULC maps with moderate spatial resolution (20 m to 100 m) have been developed using multiple Earth observation datasets for 2015–2016 for the whole continent, which provide unprecedented spatial detail of the land surface for Africa. This study aimed to compare these three recent African LULC maps (i.e. the Copernicus Global Land Service Land Cover (CGLS-LC100, 100 m), European Space Agency Sentinel-2A Land Cover (ESA-S2-LC20, 20 m) and Finer Resolution Observation and Monitoring of Global Land Cover for Africa version 2 (FROM-GLC-Africa30, 30 m)) using a validation sample set and statistics from the FAO. The results indicated that the accuracy of the three datasets was unevenly distributed in spatial extent and area estimation. All the three datasets achieve an accuracy of above 60% and the fraction layer of CGLS-LC100 showed the best consistency with FAO statistics in the area. However, great disagreement in spatial details was found among three products, with 43.12% of the total area in Africa was in low agreement. The LULC mapping regions with the highest uncertainty were southeast Africa, the Sahel region and the Eastern Africa Plateau. Uncertainty was most closely related to elevation and precipitation changes along latitude/longitude.