LACO-WIKI: AN OPEN ACCESS ONLINE PORTAL FOR LAND COVER VALIDATION

Abstract

The LACO-Wiki tool represents an open access, online portal that offers standardized land cover validation at local to global scales. LACO-Wiki integrates the LACOVAL prototype for land cover validation and the Geo-Wiki system for visualization, validation and crowdsourcing of land cover. This paper presents a conceptual overview of the LACO-Wiki system and describes the main validation workflow, in which the user uploads the map for validation, creates a validation sample, carries out the sample interpretation and generates a report detailing the accuracy assessment. In addition to a land cover validation tool, LACO-Wiki is also intended to become an open access repository for calibration and validation data that can be used by the land monitoring community to improve future land cover products.