Esri Land Cover

Sentinel-2 10-Meter Land Use/Land Cover

Land use changes rapidly. So should our maps.

Detailed. Timely. Accurate.

A 10-meter annual map of Earth's land surface from 2017-2023.

High-resolution, open, accurate, comparable, and timely land use maps are critical for decision-makers in many industry sectors and developing nations. These maps improve understanding of important topics such as food security, land use planning, surface water, and resource management planning. In addition, national government resource agencies use land use/land cover as a basis for understanding trends in the country's natural capital, which helps define land planning priorities and is the basis of budget allocations.

Mapping with AI

Existing artificial intelligence (AI) land classification models were enhanced by bringing together a massive training dataset of billions of human-labeled image pixels. These models were applied to the entire Sentinel-2 scene collection for each year – that’s over 2,000,000 Earth observations from 6 spectral bands to produce the maps.

The output provides a 9-class map of the surface, including vegetation types, bare surface, water, cropland and built areas. These maps are available from ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World.

Using these visualizations, planners worldwide will better understand the geography around them, how it has changed, and with the latest information available, be able to make more informed decisions.

Eyes on Change

Land use/Land cover maps are a snapshot in time, but natural processes and human activity can rapidly change the landscape. Too often, map availability can lag several years behind data acquisition. However, with the unique deep learning approach used to create the Sentinel-2 10m Land Use/Land Cover Time Series, an entire year of observations can be produced in a matter of days. That means we can deliver the timeliest analysis of land use for the past year and leverage the time series to detect change.

To make analyzing change even easier, we have developed the Sentinel-2 Land Cover Explorer, enabling dynamic change analysis as you explore the map.

Enabling the Entire GIS Community

Getting this information into people’s hands is a key component of this mapping initiative. Over 10 million GIS users have direct access via the web services in ArcGIS Living Atlas. Esri and Microsoft are also making the data available for download through this application or through Microsoft’s Planetary Computer.

To ensure that everyone has access, these maps, layers, and downloads are also being distributed using a Creative Commons by Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license.

Explore the Change

Launch the Land Cover Explorer application

Partnering to Provide Global Solutions

Esri continues to leverage strategic partnerships to tackle conservation and sustainability challenges across the world. Impact Observatory’s experience in providing advanced algorithms for AI/ML helps to accelerate progress in these areas.