Consistency Assessments of the Land Cover Products on the Tibetan Plateau

Abstract

Land cover and land cover change information are essential data in terrestrial surface research. However, the land cover products are highly inconsistent, especially in the mountainous area. Most land cover assessment studies focused on the consistency of spatial patterns, while ignoring the consistency of change and elevation heterogeneity. In this study, four land cover products were assessed for spatiotemporal consistency on the Tibetan Plateau (TP), including the Moderate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer land cover (MCD12Q1), the Climate Change Initiative Land Cover (CCI-LC), the 30-meter Global Land Cover (Globeland30) and the Multi-Period Land Use/Land Cover Remote Sensing Monitoring Database in China (CNLUCC). The impact of elevation on the consistency of multiple land cover products across spatiotemporal scales was further analyzed. The spatial consistency of the three and more products was about 70%, with higher consistency for grassland and bare land and lower consistency for wetland and shrubland on the TP. Globeland30 and CCI-LC were better than others for overall monitoring, with the inconsistency of less than 45% by google earth dataset validation. The temporal change consistency of the four land cover products was less than 10%. With increasing elevation, the average spatial consistency decreased and the land cover change area and temporal change consistency increased. There is a high inconsistency of land cover changes on the TP in existing commonly used products, demonstrating the need to develop high-quality land cover products in long time series.