LAMASUS researchers present an advanced 10-metre resolution map of 19 crop types

10 October 2024

LAMASUS researchers Babak Ghassemi, Emma Izquierdo-Verdiguier and Francesco Vuolo published an advanced 10-metre resolution map for the EU and Ukraine with 19 crop types  for 2022.

Using Earth Observation (EO) and in-situ data from Eurostat’s Land Use and Coverage Area Frame Survey (LUCAS) 2022, the methodology included 134,684 LUCAS Copernicus polygons, Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellite imagery, land surface temperature and a digital elevation model. Based on this data, two classification layers were developed using a Random Forest machine learning approach: a primary map and a gap-filling map to address cloud-covered gaps.

The combined maps, covering 27 EU countries, show an overall accuracy of 79.3% for seven major land cover classes and 70.6% for all 19 crop types. The trained model was used to derive the 2022 map for Ukraine, demonstrating its robustness even in regions without labelled samples for model training.