Deep Insight on Land Use/Land Cover Geospatial Assessment through Internet-Based Validation Tool in Upper Karkheh River Basin (KRB), South-West Iran

Recently, the demand for high-quality land use/land cover (LULC) information for near real-time crop type mapping, in particular for multi-relief landscapes, has increased. While the LULC classes are inherently imbalanced, the statistics generally overestimate the majority classes and underestimate the minority ones. Therefore, the aim of this study was to assess the classes of the 10 m European Satellite Agency (ESA) WorldCover 2020 land use/land cover product with the support of the Google Earth Engine (GEE) in the Honam sub-basin, south-west Iran, using the LACOVAL (validation tool for regional-scale land cover and land cover change) online platform. The effect of imbalanced ground truth has also been explored. Four sampling schemes were employed on a total of 720 collected ground truth points over approximately 14,100 ha. The grassland and cropland totally canopied 94% of the study area, while barren land, shrubland, trees and built-up covered the rest. The results of the validation accuracy showed that the equalized sampling scheme was more realistically successful than the others in terms of roughly the same overall accuracy (91.6%), mean user’s accuracy (91.6%), mean producers’ accuracy (91.9%), mean partial portmanteau (91.9%) and kappa (0.9). The product was statistically improved to 93.5% ± 0.04 by the assembling approach and segmented with the help of supplementary datasets and visual interpretation. The findings confirmed that, in mapping LULC, data of classes should be balanced before accuracy assessment. It is concluded that the product is a reliable dataset for environmental modeling at the regional scale but needs some modifications for barren land and grassland classes in mountainous semi-arid regions of the globe.