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Arid Land Geography ›› 2026, Vol. 49 ›› Issue (7): 1405-1417.doi: 10.12118/j.issn.1000-6060.2025.573

• Land Use and Ecosystem • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Accuracy evaluation and consistency analysis of multi-source land cover products in the arid regions of northwest China

YAN Yan1(), LIU Yulu1,2(), ZHANG Weige1, SUN Qian1, ZHU Shihua3   

  1. 1 College of Geography and Tourism, Luoyang Normal University, Luoyang 471934, Henan, China
    2 College of Geomatics, Xi’an University of Science and Technology, Xi’an 710054, Shaanxi, China
    3 Jiangsu Climate Center, Jiangsu Meteorological Bureau, Nanjing 210041, Jiangsu, China
  • Received:2025-09-19 Revised:2025-11-26 Online:2026-07-25 Published:2026-07-07
  • Contact: LIU Yulu E-mail:yanyan@lynu.edu.cn;liuyuluuuu@163.com

Abstract:

Accurate land cover products are essential for understanding land use structure and spatial composition in the arid regions of northwest China. In this study, five high-resolution land cover products from 2020 were selected: the ESA global 10 m land cover product (ESA10), the ESRI global 10 m land cover product (ESRI10), the global 30 m land cover product (Globeland30), the global 30 m fine-classified land cover product (GLC_FCS30), and the China annual 30 m land cover product (CLCD). Precision assessments and consistency evaluations of these multi-source land cover products were conducted for the arid regions of northwest China from three perspectives: classification accuracy, similarity in land cover composition, and classification consistency. The results indicate the following: (1) Among the five products, ESA10 achieved the highest classification accuracy (88.86%), whereas ESRI10 yielded a comparatively lower accuracy (69.69%). (2) The area correlation coefficients across the five products ranged from 0.792 to 0.999, demonstrating strong agreement in characterizing land composition in the arid regions of northwest China. Bare land, grassland, and cultivated land constitute the dominant land cover types, collectively accounting for ≥93.01% of the total area. (3) Classification consistency for bare land was the highest among the five products. The classification purity of any two-product combination reached up to 96.95%; the spatial consistency of bare land and cultivated land was also high, representing more than 56.39% of the area of the corresponding land cover types. Overall, ESA10 more accurately captured the land cover structure and spatial distribution compared with the other four products. These findings can provide a scientific basis for data selection in national land use planning and ecological conservation in the arid regions of northwest China.

Key words: land cover, accuracy test, consistency evaluation, arid regions of northwest China