Key landscapes for conservation land cover and change monitoring, thematic and validation datasets for sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Mounting social and economic demands on natural resources increasingly threaten key areas for conservation in Africa. Threats to biodiversity pose an enormous challenge to these vulnerable areas. Effective protection of sites with strategic conservation importance requires timely and highly detailed geospatial monitoring. Larger ecological zones and wildlife corridors warrant monitoring as well, as these areas have an even higher degree of pressure and habitat loss. To address this, a satellite-imagery-based monitoring workflow to cover at-risk areas at various details was developed. During the program's first phase, a total of 560 442 km2 area in sub-Saharan Africa was covered, from which 153 665 km2 was mapped with eight land cover classes while 406 776 km2 was mapped with up to 32 classes. Satellite imagery was used to generate dense time series data from which thematic land cover maps were derived. Each map and change map were fully verified and validated by an independent team to achieve our strict data quality requirements. The independent validation datasets for each key landscape for conservation (KLC) are also described and presented here (full and teaser datasets are available at https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.914261, Szantoi et al., 2020a)..