General Land Use Cover Datasets for Africa

Abstract Several general Land Use Cover (LUC) datasets are available for Africa. They provide a general picture of the land uses and covers in more than one African country, rather than focusing on any specific type. In this chapter, we review six datasets of this kind. Only one (CCI LAND COVER – S2 PROTOTYPE, 30 m) covers the whole continent, while the others map certain specific regions of Africa. All these datasets have been produced within the context of specific projects, usually sponsored by international organizations such as the European Space Agency (ESA), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) or the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Once these projects come to an end, no new updates of the maps were published, which limits the potential and the temporal resolution of the available datasets. For Africa, only the West Africa Land Use Land Cover (2 km) and the SERVIR-ESA (30 m) provide a time series of LUC maps. The first provides maps for three reference years (1975, 2000, 2013), while in the second the number of maps available and their respective reference years vary from country to country: from 2 to 4 different editions issued between 1990 and 2015. AFRICOVER (1:200,000) and the Congo Basin Vegetation Types dataset (300 m) provide LUC information for just one reference year, although they were created from imagery covering a long time-span: 1994–2001 for AFRICOVER and 2000–2007 for Congo Basin Vegetation Types. The SADC Land Cover Database (1:250,000) was obtained by merging and harmonizing national and regional LUC datasets. As a result, the reference year varies from one country to the next, always between 1990 and 1997. The CCI LAND COVER – S2 PROTOTYPE was produced at the highest spatial resolution of all the datasets reviewed in this chapter (30 m). It also provided the most comprehensive, most updated LUC image of Africa, with information for the year 2015/16.