This land cover classification of Germany was created using Sentinel-2 imagery from the years 2015 to 2017 and LUCAS 2015 in-situ reference data (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/lucas). It contains seven land cover types: (1) artificial land, (2) open soil, (3) high seasonal vegetation, (4) high perennial vegetation, (5) low seasonal vegetation, (6) low perennial vegetation and (7) water with a spatial resolution of 10m x 10m. For further information, please see the following publication: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jag.2020.102065
This dataset includes the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) derived from Sentinel-2 imagery. Using the Google Earth Engine, all granules with a cloud cover below 60% were used as input. Cloudy pixels (referring to quality layer QA60) were masked as well. Eventually, a median mosaic was composed over the whole observation period. It was also used as input for a land cover classification (see: Land Cover DE - Sentinel-2 - Germany, 2015).
The World Settlement Footprint (WSF) 2019 is a 10m resolution binary mask outlining the extent of human settlements globally derived by means of 2019 multitemporal Sentinel-1 (S1) and Sentinel-2 (S2) imagery. Based on the hypothesis that settlements generally show a more stable behavior with respect to most land-cover classes, temporal statistics are calculated for both S1- and S2-based indices. In particular, a comprehensive analysis has been performed by exploiting a number of reference building outlines to identify the most suitable set of temporal features (ultimately including 6 from S1 and 25 from S2). Training points for the settlement and non-settlement class are then generated by thresholding specific features, which varies depending on the 30 climate types of the well-established Köppen Geiger scheme. Next, binary classification based on Random Forest is applied and, finally, a dedicated post-processing is performed where ancillary datasets are employed to further reduce omission and commission errors. Here, the whole classification process has been entirely carried out within the Google Earth Engine platform. To assess the high accuracy and reliability of the WSF2019, two independent crowd-sourcing-based validation exercises have been carried out with the support of Google and Mapswipe, respectively, where overall 1M reference labels have been collected based photointerpretation of very high-resolution optical imagery.
The Sentinel-2 fractional vegetation cover (fCover) product for the Netherlands was produced as part of the NextGEOSS project at the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The goal is to derive abundance maps from atmospherically corrected Sentinel-2 multispectral images for: photosynthetically active vegetation (PV); and for combined non-photosynthetically active vegetation (NPV) and bare soil (BS). The fCover product for the Netherlands has been generated by processing 10 cloud-free Sentinel-2 tiles which covered the country on 8 September 2016. The map has a spatial resolution of 60m x 60m. The Sentinel-2 scene classification layer was used to ensure that the spectral unmixing was only performed on areas of vegetation or soil. The abundance maps were made by performing MESMA unmixing on each pixel from an endmember library of PV and combined NPV + BS spectra. The purest pixels in a scene, called endmembers, were extracted using the Spatial-Spectral Endmember Extraction (SSEE) approach. The PV and NPV+BS endmembers were classified with a random forest approach and selected to form the spectral library. The spectral library was used in the µMESMA unmixing to get the PV and NPV+BS abundances.
The product shows forest structure information on canopy height, total canopy cover and Above-ground biomass density (AGBD) in Germany as annual products from 2017 to 2022 in 10 m spatial resolution. The products were generated using a machine learning modelling approach that combines complementary spaceborne remote sensing sensors, namely GEDI (Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation; NASA; full-waveform LiDAR), Sentinel-1 (Synthetic-Aperture-Radar; ESA, C-band) and Sentinel-2 (Multispectral Instrument; ESA; VIS-NIR-SWIR). Sample estimates on forest structure from GEDI were modelled in 10 m spatial resolution as annual products based on spatio-temporal composites from Sentinel-1 and -2 for six years (2017 to 2022). The derived products are the first consistent data sets on canopy height, total canopy cover and AGBD for Germany which enable a quantitative assessment of recent forest structure dynamics, e.g. in the context of repeated drought events since 2018. The full description of the method and results can be found in the publication of Kacic et al. (2023).
The World Settlement Footprint (WSF) 3D provides detailed quantification of the average height, total volume, total area and the fraction of buildings at 90 m resolution at a global scale. It is generated using a modified version of the World Settlement Footprint human settlements mask derived from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellite imagery in combination with digital elevation data and radar imagery collected by the TanDEM-X mission. The framework includes three basic workflows: i) the estimation of the mean building height based on an analysis of height differences along potential building edges, ii) the determination of building fraction and total building area within each 90 m cell, and iii) the combination of the height information and building area in order to determine the average height and total built-up volume at 90 m gridding. In addition, global height information on skyscrapers and high-rise buildings provided by the Emporis database is integrated into the processing framework, to improve the WSF 3D Building Height and subsequently the Building Volume Layer. A comprehensive validation campaign has been performed to assess the accuracy of the dataset quantitatively by using VHR 3D building models from 19 globally distributed regions (~86,000 km2) as reference data. The WSF 3D standard layers are provided in the format of Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW)-compressed GeoTiff files, with each file - or image tile - covering an area of 1 x 1 ° geographical lat/lon at a geometric resolution of 2.8 arcsec (~ 90 m at the equator). Following the system established by the TDX-DEM mission, the latitude resolution is decreased in multiple steps when moving towards the poles to compensate for the reduced circumference of the Earth.
The World Settlement Footprint (WSF) 3D provides detailed quantification of the average height, total volume, total area and the fraction of buildings at 90 m resolution at a global scale. It is generated using a modified version of the World Settlement Footprint human settlements mask derived from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellite imagery in combination with digital elevation data and radar imagery collected by the TanDEM-X mission. The framework includes three basic workflows: i) the estimation of the mean building height based on an analysis of height differences along potential building edges, ii) the determination of building fraction and total building area within each 90 m cell, and iii) the combination of the height information and building area in order to determine the average height and total built-up volume at 90 m gridding. In addition, global height information on skyscrapers and high-rise buildings provided by the Emporis database is integrated into the processing framework, to improve the WSF 3D Building Height and subsequently the Building Volume Layer. A comprehensive validation campaign has been performed to assess the accuracy of the dataset quantitatively by using VHR 3D building models from 19 globally distributed regions (~86,000 km2) as reference data. The WSF 3D standard layers are provided in the format of Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW)-compressed GeoTiff files, with each file - or image tile - covering an area of 1 x 1 ° geographical lat/lon at a geometric resolution of 2.8 arcsec (~ 90 m at the equator). Following the system established by the TDX-DEM mission, the latitude resolution is decreased in multiple steps when moving towards the poles to compensate for the reduced circumference of the Earth.
This collection contains Sentinel-2 Level 2A surface reflectances, which are computed for the country of Germany using the time-series based MAJA processor. During the Level 2A processing, the data are corrected for atmospheric effects and clouds and their shadows are detected. The MAJA L2A product is available online for the last 12 months. Further data are kept in the archive and are available upon request. Please see https://logiciels.cnes.fr/en/content/maja for additional information on the MAJA product. The MAJA product offers an alternative to the official ESA L2A product and has been processed with consideration of the characteristics of the Sentinel-2 mission (fast collection of time series, constant sensor perspective, and global coverage). Assumptions about the temporal constancy of the ground cover are taken into account for a robust detection of clouds and a more flexible determination of aerosol properties. As a result, an improved determination of the reflectance of sunlight at the earth's surface (pixel values of the multispectral image) is derived. Further Sentinel-2 Level 2A data computed using MAJA are available on the following website: https://theia.cnes.fr
The dataset is based on an analysis combining Sentinel-1 (SAR), -2 (Multispectral) and GEDI (Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation, LiDAR) data to model vegetation structure information. The derived products show high-spatial resolution maps (10 m) of total canopy cover (cover density in %), Foliage height diversity (Fhd) index in meter, Plant area index (Pai) in meter and canopy height (rh95) in meter.
This dataset is a derivative of the WSF3D raster dataset tailored for the web. As a tiled vector dataset, it enables dynamic client-side visualization of the WSF3D metrics