A Map of Land Use and Land Cover in Southern Malawi Derived from Sentinel-2 Data (2023)

Overview

The land use and land cover map comprises the Mulanje and Phalombe districts, in Southern Malawi. It includes five classes: forest, natural vegetation, cropland, wetland, and other lands. The map is derived from Sentinel-2 mosaics, resulting in a spatial resolution of 10 meters, for 2023. 

Map Accuracy

The land use and land cover map achieves an overall accuracy of 89%. Details of user and producer accuracies are provided in Table 1.

Table 1:  Land use and land cover classification validation,including overall, producer (PA) and user (UA) accuracies values for each class.

Class 

Producer Accuracy

User Accuracy

Cropland

            93%

       85%

Wetland

         100%

      100%

Other Lands

           90%

       95%

Forest

           79%

      90%

Natural Vegetation

          90%

      90%

Overall Accuracy

           89%

Files descripion

MLW_Sentinel_LULC_2023.tif / .qml: land use and land cover map and QGIS style file

training_samples.gpkg: training samples with class labels

validation_samples.gpkg: validation samples with class labels