Land Use / Land Cover
Land-use and land-cover datasets get used for decisions with consequences — planning consent, subsidy allocation, environmental compliance, flood modelling. Which means the classification scheme, the minimum mapping unit and the accuracy assessment matter as much as the map itself.
We produce LULC classification from satellite and aerial imagery using whichever method the data and the scheme support: supervised classification, object-based segmentation, or manual interpretation where class definitions are too subtle for an automated approach to be trusted. Most real programmes end up using a combination.
Every delivery includes a proper accuracy assessment — a confusion matrix against independent reference samples, with producer and user accuracy per class and a kappa statistic. If one class is performing badly, you will see it in the numbers rather than discovering it in use.
What you receive
Every item below is issued in your own template, with your layer conventions, title block and revision scheme.
- Classification to your scheme, or to CORINE, NLCD, IPCC or Anderson
- Imagery pre-processing — radiometric and atmospheric correction, mosaicking
- Training and validation sample design with spatial stratification
- Classified raster and vectorised polygon output
- Minimum mapping unit enforcement and generalisation
- Accuracy assessment with confusion matrix and kappa per class
- Multi-date change detection with change matrix and area statistics
- Class area statistics by administrative or catchment boundary
- Cartographic output and metadata to ISO 19115
Production detail
| Typical turnaround | 3–8 weeks by area and class count |
|---|---|
| Imagery sources | Sentinel-2, Landsat, Planet, WorldView, aerial, UAV |
| Class schemes | Custom, CORINE, NLCD, IPCC, Anderson Level I–III |
| Typical accuracy | 85–95% overall, class-dependent, reported honestly |
| Minimum mapping unit | Per specification, from 0.01 ha upward |
| Output formats | GeoTIFF, GDB, SHP, GeoPackage, XLSX statistics, PDF maps |
| Revisions | Included until the accuracy target is met or shown unachievable |
Software and formats
We work in your toolchain. If something you use is not listed, ask — the list below is only what we use most.
Frequently asked
Send one land use / land cover job and see how we work
Scope, price and programme come back in writing before anything starts. Most first projects are a single deliverable so you can judge us on output, not on a pitch.