A methodology for assessing openstreetmap degree of coverage for purposes of land cover mapping

Abstract

The data available in the collaborative project OpenStreetMap (OSM) is in some locations so detailed and complete that it may provide useful data for Land Cover Map creation and validation. However, this degree of detail is not uniform along space. Therefore, one of the first requirements that needs to be assessed to determine if the creation and validation of Land Cover Maps using data available in OSM may be feasible, is the availability of data to provide a relatively complete coverage of the region of interest. To provide a fast and automatic quantitative assessment of this requirement a methodology is presented and tested in this article. Four study areas are considered, all located in Europe. The results show that the four regions presented very different coverages at the time of data download and its spatial distribution was not uniform. This approach enabled the identification of the most problematic regions for land cover mapping, where low levels of data coverage are available. Since the proposed methodology can be automated, it enables a fast identification of the regions that, in a preliminary analysis, may be considered fit for further analysis to assess fitness for use for Land Cover Map creation and/or validation.