Info

The CCI Land Cover (LC) team is proud to announce the successful development of a prototype high resolution LC map at 10m over Mexico and Central America based on more than 2 years of Sentinel-2A and 2B observations from January 2016 to March 2018. The main objective of the 'S2 prototype LC map at 10m of Mesoamerica' release is to collect users feedback in order to improve the next generation of HR Land Cover products and drive the R&D activities to achieve that objective.

The Coordinate Reference System used for this dataset is a geographic coordinate system (GCS) based on the World Geodetic System 84 (WGS84) reference ellipsoid and using a Plate Carrée projection.

The typology of the 'S2 prototype LC map at 10m of Mesoamerica' was defined using the Land Cover Classification System (LCCS) (FAO) which defines LC classes using a set of classifiers. The system was designed as a hierarchical classification, which allows adjusting the thematic detail of the legend to the amount of information available to describe each LC class, whilst following a standardised classification approach.

In this LC mapping exercise, the regional landscape of Mexico and Central America is described in 10 generic LC classes: "trees cover areas", "shrubs cover areas", "grassland", "cropland", "vegetation aquatic or regularly flooded", "sparse vegetation", "bare areas", "built up areas", "snow and/or ice" and "open water".

The classification chain is organized into 3 main steps: (i) the preparation of the training dataset and generation of a stratification layer using auxiliary datasets, (ii) the generation of a LC map using a random forest classifier on the Sentinel-2A and 2B Level 2 TOC time series and (iii) the application of post-edition rules to reformat the generated LC map into the standards of the ESA CCI-LC S2 prototype LC map of Mesoamerica at 10m. Further information can be found in the ESA CCI-LC Algorithm Theoretical Basis Document 2018.

The qualitative assessment is done through comparisons between the 'S2 prototype LC map at 10m of Mesoamerica', the North American Land Change Monitoring System for Mexico (MEX-NALCMS) (Latifovic et al., 2012), Globeland30 (Chen et al., 2014) at 30m spatial resolution and very high resolution imagery.

The 'S2 prototype LC map at 10m of Mesoamerica' accuracy was estimated over a significant set of locations in Mexico by comparison with reference data collected for the year 2018. The validation process independence is ensured by using a validation dataset not used during the generation of the product. Further information can be found in the ESA CCI-LC Product Validation and Intercomparison Report and in the Memoria de actividades en la validación del mapa de México y Centroamérica.

Visualise

Considering the heavy download related to the full 'S2 prototype LC map at 10m of Mesoamerica', a web interface was developed to mainly visualize and interact with data.

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Download

In this section the user can download the full 'S2 prototype LC map at 10m of Mesoamerica' product in GeoTIFF format with a size of approximatively 3GB and the colour legend. Please ensure that you have the appropriate internet connection and computer capacity. The prototype is made available in order to collect user feedbacks to improve the next generation of HR Land Cover products and drive the R&D activities to achieve that objective.

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Contact points

We invite you to contact us at due@esa.int for: