Assessing the suitability of urban-oriented land cover products for mapping rural settlements

In recent years, new settlement mapping products have become available at the global and continental scale. Although accuracy assessments indicated high quality of these products, were performed mainly on urban areas. However, there is also a need to monitor rural development, as it often located in proximity biodiversity hotspots. this paper, we verified suitability three (i.e., Global Urban Footprint – GUF, European Settlement Map ESM Open Street OSM) detect settlements Carpathian ecoregion. Two independent that GUF captures most effectively (overall OA 65.4% 92.5% depending procedure). contrast, overestimated (OA 49.5% 90.8%), while OSM 61.2% 90.2%) was inconsistent source data. A regional comparison some deviations from accuracies, reflecting variability structures within study area. This highlights although best-performing product across whole area, information provided rather conservative, are still insufficiently represented all tested datasets.