Annual Land Use and Urban Land Cover: Ethiopia, Nigeria, and South Africa, 2016-2020

This dataset provides a two-tier annual Land Use (LU) and Urban Land Cover (LC) product suite over three African countries, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and South Africa, across a 5-year period of 2016-2020. Remote sensing data sources were used to create 30-m resolution LU maps (Tier-1), which were then utilized to delineate urban boundaries for 10-m resolution LC classes (Tier-2). Random Forest machine learning classifier models were trained on reference data for each tier and country (but one model was trained across all years); models were validated using a separate reference data set for each tier and country. Tier-1 LU maps were based on the 30-m Landsat time series, and Tier-2 urban LC maps were based on the 10-m Sentinel-2 time series. Additional data sources included climate, topography, night-time light, and soils. The overall map accuracy was 65-80% for Tier-1 maps and 60-80% for Tier-2 maps, depending on the year and country. The data are provided in cloud optimized GeoTIFF (COG) format.

Data and Resources

Additional Info

Field Value
Maintainer Earthdata Forum
Last Updated June 22, 2026, 18:13 (UTC)
Created April 1, 2025, 14:20 (UTC)
accessLevel public
bureauCode {026:00}
catalog_conformsTo https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
harvest_object_id 697f0f9e-b4b1-4bb8-b2e7-f1865e71a415
harvest_source_id b99e41c6-fe79-4c19-bbc3-9b6c8111bfac
harvest_source_title Science Discovery Engine
identifier 10.3334/ORNLDAAC/2367
license https://www.usa.gov/government-works
modified 2026-06-15T22:15:59Z
programCode {026:000}
publisher ORNL_DAAC
resource-type Dataset
source_datajson_identifier true
source_hash 0df3b5805ba394a1993867148848a23ed765f59f1f8151e0b4b7c26116b68aed
source_schema_version 1.1
spatial ["CARTESIAN", [{"WestBoundingCoordinate": 2.5725, "NorthBoundingCoordinate": 16.2061, "EastBoundingCoordinate": 49.6875, "SouthBoundingCoordinate": -35.3369}]]
temporal 2016-01-01/2020-12-31
theme {"Earth Science"}