An improved global land cover mapping in 2015 with 30 m resolution (GLC-2015) based on a multi-source product fusion approach

Abstract. Global land cover (GLC) information with fine spatial resolution is a fundamental data input for studies on biogeochemical cycles of the Earth system and global climate change. Although there are several public GLC products with 30 m resolution, considerable inconsistencies were found among them especially in fragmented regions and transition zones, which brings great uncertainties to various application tasks. In this paper, we developed an improved global land cover map in 2015 with 30 m resolution (GLC-2015) by fusing multiple existing land cover products based on the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence (DSET). Firstly, we used more than 160,000 global point-based samples to locally evaluated the reliability of the input GLC products for each LC class within each 4°×4° geographical grid for the establishment of the basic probability assignment (BPA) function. Then, the Dempster’s rule of combination was used for each 30 m pixel to derive the combined probability mass of each possible land cover class from all the candidate maps. Finally, each pixel was determined with a land cover class based on a decision rule. Through this fusing process, each pixel is expected to be assigned with the land cover class that contributes to achieve a higher accuracy. We assessed our product separately with 34,987 global point-based samples and 144 global patch-based samples. Results show that, the GLC-2015 map achieved the highest mapping performance globally, continentally, and eco-regionally compared with the existing 30 m GLC maps, with an overall accuracy of 76.0 % (83.8 %) and a kappa coefficient of 0.715 (0.548) against the point-based (patch-based) validation samples. Additionally, we found that the GLC-2015 map showed substantial outperformance in the areas of inconsistency, with an accuracy improvement of 17.6 %–23.2 % in areas of moderate inconsistency, and 21.0 %–25.2 % in areas of high inconsistency. Hopefully, this improved GLC-2015 product can be applied to reduce uncertainties in the research on global environmental changes, ecosystem service assessments, and hazard damage evaluations, etc. The GLC-2015 map developed in this study is available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.19752856.v1 (Li et al., 2022).