Global and local land-cover mapping products provide important data on land surface. However, the accuracy of land-cover products is the key issue for their further scientific application. There has been neglect of the relationship between inclusion probability and spatial heterogeneity in traditional spatially balanced sampling. The aim of this paper was to propose an improved spatially balanced sampling method using landscape pattern-based inclusion probability. Compared with other global land-cover datasets, Globeland30 has the advantages of high resolution and high classification accuracy. A two-stage stratified spatially balanced sampling scheme was designed and applied to the regional validation of GlobeLand30 in China. In this paper, the whole area was divided into three parts: the Tibetan Plateau region, the Northwest China region, and the East China region. The results show that 7242 sample points were selected, and the overall accuracy of GlobeLand30-2010 in China was found to be 80.46%, which is close to the third-party assessment accuracy of GlobeLand30. This method improves the representativeness of samples, reduces the classification error of remote sensing, and provides better guidance for biodiversity and sustainable development of environment.

The new type of multi-temporal global land use data with multiple classes is able to provide information on both the different land covers and their temporal changes; furthermore, it is able to contribute to many applications, such as those involving global climate and Earth ecosystem analyses. However, the current accuracy assessment methods have two limitations regarding multi-temporal land cover data that have multiple classes. First, multi-temporal land cover uses data from multiple phases, which is time-consuming and inefficient if evaluated one by one. Secondly, the conversion between different land cover classes increases the complexity of the sample stratification, and the assessments with different types of land cover suffer from inefficient sample stratification. In this paper, we propose a spatiotemporal stratified sampling method for stratifying the multi-temporal GlobeLand30 products for China. The changed and unchanged types of each class of data in the three periods are used to obtain a reasonable stratification. Then, the strata labels are simplified by using binary coding, i.e., a 1 or 0 representing a specified class or a nonspecified class, to improve the efficiency of the stratification. Additionally, the stratified sample size is determined by the combination of proportional allocation and empirical evaluation. The experimental results show that spatiotemporal stratified sampling is beneficial for increasing the sample size of the “change” strata for multi-temporal data and can evaluate not only the accuracy and area of the data in a single data but also the accuracy and area of the data in a multi-period change type and an unchanged type. This work also provides a good reference for the assessment of multi-temporal data with multiple classes.

The stratified sampling is widely used in quality assessment of remote-sensing-derived geospatial data (RSGD). Because of the different stratification indicators (also called the stratification variables) used in stratified sampling, it will lead to different evaluation results. By using fractal theory, this paper proposes a stratified sampling method based on fractal (SSF) for quality assessment of RSGD. As a stratification variable, fractal dimension is related to and independent of the study variable in the quality assessment of RSGD. This method can quantitatively and accurately stratify the population, which leads to minimizing the intra stratum variance, acquiring higher estimation accuracy and estimation efficiency. The proposed SSF method in this paper is transformed into three formulated problems: the quantitative calculation of fractal, the optimal solution of the stratum boundary value and the configuration of sample sizes. The experiment shows a quantitative performance comparison of SSF, Stratified Sampling based on Class (SSC) and Sample Random Sampling (SRS) using the South Sudan Global Core Vector Database (GCVD)2020. Design effect (DEFF) and Root-Mean-Square Error (RMSE) provide a quantitative assessment of the performance in this study. The experimental results verify the feasibility and applicability of the SSF proposed in this paper. It also shows higher estimation accuracy and more economical cost.

Reducing the lag in the accuracy assessment of multi-temporal land-cover products has been a hot research topic. By identifying the changed strata, the annual accuracy in multi-temporal products can be quickly evaluated. However, there are still two limitations in the accuracy assessment of multi-temporal products. Firstly, the setting of the parameters (e.g., the total sample size, allocation of samples in the changed strata, etc.) in the fundamental sampling design is not based on specific setting criteria. Therefore, this evaluation method is not always applicable when the product or research area changes. Secondly, the accuracy evaluation of multi-temporal products does not consider the influence of misclassification. This can lead to an overestimation of the accuracy of changed strata in single-year evaluations. In this paper, we describe how the total sample and the assignment of samples in every stratum can be adjusted according to the characteristics of the land-cover product, which improves the applicability of the evaluation. The samples in the changed strata that propagate misclassification are essentially pixels that have not undergone any land-cover change. Therefore, in order to eliminate the propagation of this inter-annual classification error, the misclassified samples are reclassified as unchanged strata. This method was used in the multi-temporal ESA CCI land-cover product. The experimental results indicate that the single-year accuracy, considering classification error, is closer to the traditional evaluation accuracy of single-temporal data. For the categories with a small ratio of unchanged strata samples to changed strata samples, the accuracy improvement, after eliminating the classification errors, is more obvious. For the urban class, in particular, the misclassification affects its estimated accuracy by 9.72%.

In recent years, the availability of multi-temporal global land-cover datasets has meant that they have become a key data source for evaluating land cover in many applications. Due to the high data volume of the multi-temporal land-cover datasets, probability sampling is an efficient method for validating multi-temporal global urban land-cover maps. However, the current accuracy assessment methods often work for a single-epoch dataset, and they are not suitable for multi-temporal data products. Limitations such as repeated sampling and inappropriate sample allocation can lead to inaccurate evaluation results. In this study, we propose the use of spatio-temporal stratified sampling to assess thematic mappings with respect to the temporal changes and spatial clustering. The total number of samples in the two stages, i.e., map and pixel, was obtained by using a probability sampling model. Since the proportion of the area labeled as no change is large while that of the area labeled as change is small, an optimization algorithm for determining the sample sizes of the different strata is proposed by minimizing the sum of variance of the user’s accuracy, producer’s accuracy, and proportion of area for all strata. The experimental results show that the allocation of sample size by the proposed method results in the smallest bias in the estimated accuracy, compared with the conventional sample allocation, i.e., equal allocation and proportional allocation. The proposed method was applied to multi-temporal global urban land-cover maps from 2000 to 2010, with a time interval of 5 years. Due to the spatial aggregation characteristics, the local pivotal method (LPM) is adopted to realize spatially balanced sampling, leading to more representative samples for each stratum in the spatial domain. The main contribution of our research is the proposed spatio-temporal sampling approach and the accuracy assessment conducted for the multi-temporal global urban land-cover product.