Exploring the Usefulness of Land Parcel Data for Evaluating Multi- Temporal Built-up Land Layers

The increasing amount of free and open remote sensing data suggests that a number of multitemporal land use and built-up land datasets derived from remotely sensed imagery will be made available soon. However, little research has been done regarding the approaches to evaluate spatiotemporal uncertainty of such products. Employing publicly available cadastral data with information on construction date may be useful for this purpose but requires developing a proper validation protocol. In this work we present preliminary results from a feasibility study that examines the potential use of land parcel data as reference data for spatiotemporal evaluation of such built-up land data, exemplified by the novel Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL). The results indicate that alternative strategies shall be considered, as the use of parcel data tends to bias the evaluation results due to inherent mismatches between the two data sources, especially in rural areas.