Assessing the suitability of urban-oriented land cover products for mapping rural settlements - accuracy data and code

The data covers two independent accuracy assessmets, based on 2 sets of randomly selected points, for three urban-oriented land cover products: Global Urban Footprint - GUF, European Settlement Map - ESM and Open Street Map - OSM) to detect rural settlements in the Carpathian ecoregion. The study area covers the Carpathians located in 5 countries: Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. The accuracy assessment was conducted with two independent approaches regarding the selection of verification points. In the first approach, a set of verification points was defined through the stratified random selection of 500 points per country (2500 points in total) within the area of any of the three analysed settlement datasets combined, hereafter called the ‘total settlement mask’. In the second approach, a set of verification points was defined through the stratified random selection of 500 independent points per country (2500 points in total) within the ‘total settlement mask’ buffered by 100 m, hereafter called the ‘buffer mask’. The dataset is accompanied with Python code.