Open educational resources for validation of global high-resolution land cover maps

Abstract

Land cover (LC) maps are crucial to analyze and understand several phenomena, including urbanization, deforestation and climate change. This elevates the importance of their accuracy, which is assessed through a validation process. However, we observed that knowledge on the importance of LC maps and their validation is limited. Hence, a set of educational resources has been created to assist in the validation of LC maps. These resources, available under an open access license, focus on validation through open source and easy-to-use software. Moreover, addressing the lack of accurate and up-to-date reference LC data, an application has been developed that provides users a means to collect LC data.