Mapping Land Coverage in the Kapuas Watershed Using Machine Learning in Google Earth Engine

Abstract

Land cover information is essential data in the management of watersheds. The challenge in providing land cover information in the Kapuas watershed is the cloud cover and its significant area coverage, thus requiring a large image scene. The presence of a cloud-based spatial data processing platform that is Google Earth Engine (GEE) can be answered these challenges. Therefore this study aims to map land cover in the Kapuas watershed using machine learning-based classification on GEE.
 The process of mapping land cover in the Kapuas watershed requires about ten scenes of Landsat 8 satellite imagery. The selected year is 2019, with mapped land cover classes consisting of bodies of water, vegetation cover, open land, and built-up area. Machine learning that tested included CART, Random Forest, GMO Max Entropy, SVM Voting, and SVM Margin.
 The results of this study indicate that the best machine learning in mapping land cover in the Kapuas watershed is GMO Max Entropy, then CART. This research still has many limitations, especially mapped land cover classes. So that research needs to be developed with more detailed land cover classes, more diverse and multi-time input data.