Conventional and fuzzy comparisons of large scale land cover products: Application to CORINE, GLC2000, MODIS and GlobCover in Europe

One of the major drawbacks of land cover products is the lack of interoperability among them. Since their development was driven by different national or international initiatives, they were developed for different purposes and hold diverse technical characteristics. Thus, comparison among products and quality monitoring is necessary in assessing their usefulness. This paper provides a methodology to compare global land cover maps that allows for differences in legend definitions among products. Two different approaches were considered for map comparison, a Boolean approach and a new methodology based on fuzzy set theory in which the Land Cover Classification System (LCCS) acted as a genera…