Assessing the suitability of GlobeLand30 for mapping land cover in Germany

Global land cover maps have been widely employed as the base layer for a number of applications including climate change, food security, water quality, biodiversity, change detection and environmental planning. Due to the importance of land cover, there is a pressing need to increase the temporal and spatial resolution of global land cover maps. A recent advance in this direction has been the GlobeLand30 dataset derived from Landsat imagery, which has been developed by the National Geomatics Center of China (NGCC). Although overall accuracy is greater than 80%, the NGCC would like help in assessing the accuracy of the product in different regions of the world. To assist in this process, this study compares the GlobeLand30 product with existing public and online datasets, i.e. CORINE, Urban Atlas, OpenStreetMap and ATKIS for Germany in order to assess overall and per class agreement. The results of the analysis reveal high agreement of up to 92% between these datasets and GlobeLand30 but that large disagreements for certain classes are evident, in particular wetlands. However, overall, GlobeLand30 is shown to be a useful product for characterizing land cover in Germany, and paves the way for further regional and national validation efforts.