Abstract

Accurate land cover mapping is essential for supporting ecological protection and resource management. However, in regions with complex and fragmented landscapes, such as Southern China (SC), existing medium- and high-resolution land cover products exhibit limited accuracy. To address this challenge, we developed Superpixel_U-Net, a multi-head segmentation algorithm that combines semantic segmentation and superpixel segmentation, to generate a 1.5 m land cover map for SC (the SCLC map). Towards this purpose, we acquired 6.1 TB very-high-resolution (VHR) ESRI World imagery and manually annotated 43,000 VHR images into eight land cover classes. Vegetation and water indices derived from Sentinel-2 imagery were used as auxiliary inputs to enrich spectral features. The resulting SCLC map achieved Pixel Accuracy (PA) values of 88.83% and 90.66% in the pixel-level and patch-level validations respectively, and showed a strong agreement with official survey reports (R<sup>2</sup> = 0.88). This dataset provides a solid foundation for further analyses that require accurate delineation of land cover types in SC.

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Year
2025
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Xiaomei Hu, Wenkai Li, Zhenong Jin et al. (2025). A 1.5 m resolution land cover map of Southern China created with Superpixel U-Net. Scientific Data . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-06373-y

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DOI
10.1038/s41597-025-06373-y