Download Sentinel-2 10-Meter Land Use - Land Cover
Land use changes rapidly. So should our maps.
Detailed. Timely. Accurate.
An annual 10-meter resolution map of Earth's land surface from 2017-2021
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 from 2017 to 2021 -- 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. Often, these maps lag behind several years from data acquisition to map availability. The unique machine learning approach used to create these global maps can process an entire year of observations 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 pre-processed several layers that show how land use has changed from 2018 until 2021 -- from human-caused deforestation to wildfire scars, shrinking water bodies to urbanization. These change analysis layers are also made available in Living Atlas. Scroll to the bottom of the page to find bookmarked areas of interest and the full timeseries to browse.
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
Use the bookmarks and time slider to tour areas of change around the world
https://livingatlas.arcgis.com/landcover/
Map API
- https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=d3da5dd386d140cf93fc9ecbf8da5e31
- https://env1.arcgis.com/arcgis/rest/services/Sentinel2_10m_LandCover/ImageServer
Can use to open in QGIS
