Evaluating the Potentiality of Sentinel-2 for Change Detection Analysis Associated to LULUCF in Wallonia, Belgium

Abstract

Land Use/Cover changes are crucial for the use of sustainable resources and the delivery of ecosystem services. They play an important contribution in the climate change mitigation due to their ability to emit and remove greenhouse gas from the atmosphere. These emissions/removals are subject to an inventory which must be reported annually under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This study investigates the use of Sentinel-2 data for analysing lands conversion associated to Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry sector in the Wallonia region (southern Belgium). This region is characterized by one of the lowest conversion rates across European countries, which constitutes a particular challenge in identifying land changes. The proposed research tests the most commonly used change detection techniques on a bi-temporal and multi-temporal set of mosaics of Sentinel-2 data from the years 2016 and 2018. Our results reveal that land conversion is a very rare phenomenon in Wallonia. All the change detection techniques tested have been found to substantially overestimate the changes. In spite of this moderate results our study has demonstrated the potential of Sentinel-2 regarding land conversion. However, in this specific context of very low magnitude of land conversion in Wallonia, change detection techniques appear to be not sufficient to exceed the signal to noise ratio.

Keywords

• change detection
• Sentinel-2
• LULUCF