North Rhine-Westphalia Land Cover Derived from Sentinel-2 and Orthophotos

15 land cover classes, including building construction, vegetation, and water bodies, are defined for North Rhine-Westphalia. The dataset is derived from a combined analysis of Sentinel-2 satellite data and digital orthophotos, supplemented by ALKIS data and a normalized digital surface model. It is provided by the Bundesamt für Kartographie und Geodäsie.

Use Cases

• Urban development analysis based on building construction and civil engineering land cover classes.
• Environmental monitoring based on vegetation and water body land cover classes.
• Accuracy assessment of remote sensing classifications based on documented consumer accuracy metrics.
• Small-scale feature mapping based on the minimum capture size of 10m2 for buildings.

Strengths

• The dataset covers North Rhine-Westphalia nationwide without overlapping tiles.
• Geometric accuracy corresponds to a target of 1 to 2 meters.
• Includes metadata on data freshness via GetFeatureInfo, showing latest and oldest recording dates.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Three of the standard 15 land cover classes (solid rock, sea, ice) are not present in the region.

Provenance

Source

Bundesamt für Kartographie und Geodäsie

Collection Method

Derived from combined image analysis of Sentinel-2 satellite data and digital orthophotos, using ALKIS data and a normalized digital surface model.

Geography

North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany