The existing medium-resolution land cover time series produced under the European Space Agency's Climate Change Initiative provides 29 years (1992–2020) of annual land cover maps at 300 m resolution, allowing for a detailed study of land change dynamics over the contemporary era. Because models need two-dimensional parameters rather than two-dimensional land cover information, the land cover classes must be converted into model-appropriate plant functional types (PFTs) to apply this time series to Earth system and land surface models. The first-generation cross-walking table that was presented with the land cover product prescribed pixel-level PFT fractional compositions that varied by land cover class but that lacked spatial variability. Here we describe a new ready-to-use data product for climate modelling: spatially explicit annual maps of PFT fractional composition at 300 m resolution for 1992–2020, created by fusing the 300 m medium-resolution land cover product with several existing high-resolution datasets using a globally consistent method. In the resulting data product, which has 14 layers for each of the 29 years, pixel values at 300 m resolution indicate the percentage cover (0 %–100 %) for each of 14 PFTs, with pixel-level PFT composition exhibiting significant intra-class spatial variability at the global scale. We additionally present an updated version of the user tool that allows users to modify the baseline product (e.g. re-mapping, re-projection, PFT conversion, and spatial sub-setting) to meet individual needs. Finally, these new PFT maps have been used in two land surface models – Organising Carbon and Hydrology in Dynamic Ecosystems (ORCHIDEE) and the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES) – to demonstrate their benefit over the conventional maps based on a generic cross-walking table. Regional changes in the fractions of trees, short vegetation, and bare-soil cover induce changes in surface properties, such as the albedo, leading to significant changes in surface turbulent fluxes, temperature, and vegetation carbon stocks. The dataset is accessible at https://doi.org/10.5285/26a0f46c95ee4c29b5c650b129aab788 (Harper et al., 2023).

Land cover is one of the essential climate variables of the ESA Climate Change Initiative (CCI). In this context, the Land Cover CCI (LC CCI) project aims at building global land cover maps suitable for climate modeling based on Earth observation by satellite sensors. The challenge is to generate a set of successive maps that are both accurate and consistent over time. To do so, operational methods for the automated classification of optical images are investigated. The proposed approach consists of a locally trained classification using an automated selection of training samples from existing, but outdated land cover information. Combinations of local extraction (based on spatial criteria) and self-cleaning of training samples (based on spectral criteria) are quantitatively assessed. Two large study areas, one in Eurasia and the other in South America, are considered. The proposed morphological cleaning of the training samples leads to higher accuracies than the statistical outlier removal in the spectral domain. An optimal neighborhood has been identified for the local sample extraction. The results are coherent for the two test areas, showing an improvement of the overall accuracy compared with the original reference datasets and a significant reduction of macroscopic errors. More importantly, the proposed method partly controls the reliability of existing land cover maps as sources of training samples for supervised classification.

Land cover and land use maps derived from satellite remote sensing imagery are critical to support biodiversity and conservation, especially over large areas. With its 10 m to 20 m spatial resolution, Sentinel-2 is a promising sensor for the detection of a variety of landscape features of ecological relevance. However, many components of the ecological network are still smaller than the 10 m pixel, i.e., they are sub-pixel targets that stretch the sensor’s resolution to its limit. This paper proposes a framework to empirically estimate the minimum object size for an accurate detection of a set of structuring landscape foreground/background pairs. The developed method combines a spectral separability analysis and an empirical point spread function estimation for Sentinel-2. The same approach was also applied to Landsat-8 and SPOT-5 (Take 5), which can be considered as similar in terms of spectral definition and spatial resolution, respectively. Results show that Sentinel-2 performs consistently on both aspects. A large number of indices have been tested along with the individual spectral bands and target discrimination was possible in all but one case. Overall, results for Sentinel-2 highlight the critical importance of a good compromise between the spatial and spectral resolution. For instance, the Sentinel-2 roads detection limit was of 3 m and small water bodies are separable with a diameter larger than 11 m. In addition, the analysis of spectral mixtures draws attention to the uneven sensitivity of a variety of spectral indices. The proposed framework could be implemented to assess the fitness for purpose of future sensors within a large range of applications.

Accurate maps of surface water extent are of paramount importance for water management, satellite data processing and climate modeling. Several maps of water bodies based on remote sensing data have been released during the last decade. Nonetheless, none has a truly (90 ${}^{\circ }$ N/90 ${}^{\circ }$ S) global coverage while being thoroughly validated. This paper describes a global, spatially-complete (void-free) and accurate mask of inland/ocean water for the 2000–2012 period, built in the framework of the European Space Agency (ESA) Climate Change Initiative (CCI). This map results from the synergistic combination of multiple individual SAR and optical water body and auxiliary datasets. A key aspect of this work is the original and rigorous stratified random sampling designed for the quality assessment of binary classifications where one class is marginally distributed. Input and consolidated products were assessed qualitatively and quantitatively against a reference validation database of 2110 samples spread throughout the globe. Using all samples, overall accuracy was always very high among all products, between $98\%$ and $100\%$ . The CCI global map of open water bodies provided the best water class representation (F-score of $89\%$ ) compared to its constitutive inputs. When focusing on the challenging areas for water bodies’ mapping, such as shorelines, lakes and river banks, all products yielded substantially lower accuracy figures with overall accuracies ranging between $74\%$ and $89\%$ . The inland water area of the CCI global map of open water bodies was estimated to be 3.17 million km ${}^2$ ± 0.24 million km ${}^2$ . The dataset is freely available through the ESA CCI Land Cover viewer.

Accurate and timely information on the global cropland extent is critical for food security monitoring, water management and earth system modeling. Principally, it allows for analyzing satellite image time-series to assess the crop conditions and permits isolation of the agricultural component to focus on food security and impacts of various climatic scenarios. However, despite its critical importance, accurate information on the spatial extent, cropland mapping with remote sensing imagery remains a major challenge. Following an exhaustive identification and collection of existing land cover maps, a multi-criteria analysis was designed at the country level to evaluate the fitness of a cropland map with regards to four dimensions: its timeliness, its legend, its resolution adequacy and its confidence level. As a result, a Unified Cropland Layer that combines the fittest products into a 250 m global cropland map was assembled. With an evaluated accuracy ranging from 82% to 95%, the Unified Cropland Layer successfully improved the accuracy compared to single global products.

Global land cover information is required to initialize land surface and Earth system models. In recent years, new land cover (LC) datasets at finer spatial resolutions have become available while those currently implemented in most models are outdated. This study assesses the applicability of the Climate Change Initiative (CCI) LC product for use in the Canadian Land Surface Scheme (CLASS) through comparison with finer resolution datasets over Canada, assisted with reference sample data and a vegetation continuous field tree cover fraction dataset. The results show that in comparison with the finer resolution maps over Canada, the 300 m CCI product provides much improved LC distribution over that from the 1 km GLC2000 dataset currently used to provide initial surface conditions in CLASS. However, the CCI dataset appears to overestimate needleleaf forest cover especially in the taiga-tundra transition zone of northwestern Canada. This may have partly resulted from limited availability of clear sky MEdium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) images used to generate the CCI classification maps due to the long snow cover season in Canada. In addition, changes based on the CCI time series are not always consistent with those from the MODIS or a Landsat-based forest cover change dataset, especially prior to 2003 when only coarse spatial resolution satellite data were available for change detection in the CCI product. It will be helpful for application in global simulations to determine whether these results also apply to other regions with similar landscapes, such as Eurasia. Nevertheless, the detailed LC classes and finer spatial resolution in the CCI dataset provide an improved reference map for use in land surface models in Canada. The results also suggest that uncertainties in the current cross-walking tables are a major source of the often large differences in the plant functional types (PFT) maps, and should be an area of focus in future work.