Evaluation of six global high-resolution global land cover products over China

Land cover is an important variable for climate, hydrology, and ecology studies. With the availability of various high-resolution global land cover (GLC) products, conducting a comprehensive assessment on their accuracy and consistency is important. In this study, we compared the performance of three latest 10-m-resolution GLC products, which include FROMGLC10 in 2017, ESA’s Worldcover10 in 2020, and ESRIGLC10 in 2020, and three latest 30-m-resolution GLC products, which include FROMGLC30 in 2017, GLC_FCS30 in 2020, and Globeland30 in 2020, in China. The consistency of these products was investigated in terms of spatial consistency and area consistency. Though the six GLC products demonstrate similar overall distribution patterns, their detailed spatial distributions are quite different, especially for the three 10-m-resolution products. Evidently, the cropland, forest, grassland, and bareland exhibited high inconsistencies than the other types. The classification accuracy of the six GLC products was also quantitatively assessed based on a visual-interpretation-based reference dataset. FROMGLC10 exhibits the highest overall accuracy of 65.57%, followed by FROMGLC30 (64.96%) and Worldcover10 (62.74%). ESRIGLC10 (49.79%) exhibits the lowest accuracy. The accuracies of shrubland, wetland, and tundra were relatively low. This study provides a valuable reference for selecting appropriate GLC products for potential users.