Annual Land Use and Urban Land Cover: Ethiopia, Nigeria, and South Africa, 2016-2020

Remote sensing data sources were used to create 30-m resolution LU maps (Tier-1), which were then utilized to delineate urban boundaries for 10-m resolution LC classes (Tier-2). Random Forest machine learning classifier models were trained on reference data for each tier and country (but one model was trained across all years); models were validated using a separate reference data set for each tier and country.

Tier-1 LU maps were based on the 30-m Landsat time series, and Tier-2 urban LC maps were based on the 10-m Sentinel-2 time series. Additional data sources included climate, topography, night-time light, and soils. The overall map accuracy was 65-80% for Tier-1 maps and 60-80% for Tier-2 maps, depending on the year and country.