Summary
Land cover maps show what type of land exists in different places, like forests, wetlands, or cities. The authors looked at a special map made just for Quebec to see how well it matches with well-known global maps created from satellite images. They checked things like how land areas are shaped and how distinct the land types appear in the images. The Quebec map was quite similar to one global map but had clear differences in some land types, such as urban and wetland areas. This study helps people who monitor land use understand how this local map fits with bigger global maps.
What this means in practice
- •For environmental monitoring teams: Use the Quebec-specific land cover map for more accurate yearly tracking of land changes in Quebec's diverse ecological regions.
- •For urban planners: Incorporate the Quebec land cover product to better identify urban expansion and soil artificialisation in localized planning decisions.
Abstract
High-resolution land use and land cover (LULC) products derived from Sentinel-2 imagery are widely used for environmental monitoring and land management, yet their performance can vary across regions with complex ecological gradients and heterogeneous surface conditions. In Quebec, these limitations motivated the development of a provincial 10-m land-cover product, the COTQ, designed to support annual monitoring of land occupation and soil artificialisation. This study presents a systematic evaluation of the COTQ product relative to three global 10-m LULC datasets: ESA WorldCover, ESRI LandCover, and Google DynamicWorld. This paper does not introduce a new mapping methodology but focuses on analysing the behaviour and consistency of the COTQ using complementary evaluation approaches. All products are harmonized under a common legend and compared using structural indicators (object-size distributions, shape complexity, Adjusted Rand Index, and Intersection over Union), spectral separability metrics derived from Sentinel-2 reflectance data, and a targeted photo-interpretation of disagreement areas. The analysis is conducted over eight Sentinel-2 tiles selected to represent the main bioclimatic domains of Québec, from temperate and boreal forests to northern tundra environments. The results show that the COTQ exhibits structural and spectral characteristics most similar to ESA WorldCover among the reference global products, while revealing systematic differences linked to class definitions and thematic priorities, particularly for urban areas, wetlands, and rocky or cryptogamic surfaces. This multi-criteria evaluation provides an objective characterization of the COTQ product and clarifies its relative positioning with respect to existing global land-cover datasets for operational land monitoring in Québec.