Land Cover Classification Map of Northeast Asia Using GOCI Data

Land cover (LC) is an important factor in socioeconomic and environmental studies. According to various studies, a number of LC maps, including global land cover (GLC) datasets, are made using polar orbit satellite data. Due to the insufficiencies of reference datasets in Northeast Asia, several LC maps display discrepancies in that region. In this paper, we performed a feasibility assessment of LC mapping using Geostationary Ocean Color Imager (GOCI) data over Northeast Asia. To produce the LC map, the GOCI normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) was used as an input dataset and a level-2 LC map of South Korea was used as a reference dataset to evaluate the LC map. In this paper, 7 LC types(urban, croplands, forest, grasslands, wetlands, barren, and water) were defined to reflect Northeast Asian LC. The LC map was produced via principal component analysis (PCA) with K-means clustering, and a sensitivity analysis was performed. The overall accuracy was calculated to be 77.94%. Furthermore, to assess the accuracy of the LC map not only in South Korea but also in Northeast Asia, 6 GLC datasets (IGBP, UMD, GLC2000, GlobCover2009, MCD12Q1, GlobeLand30) were used as comparison datasets. The accuracy scores for the 6 GLC datasets were calculated to be 59.41%, 56.82%, 60.97%, 51.71%, 70.24%, and 72.80%, respectively. Therefore, the first attempt to produce the LC map using geostationary satellite data is considered to be acceptable.