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Land cover maps of La Réunion islands in 1950 and 2022

The resource provides two land cover maps of Réunion Island for the years 1950 and 2022 derived from the analysis of ortho-photographs at the island scale (Source IGN). The produced typology uses five cover classes: forest, low vegetation, agriculture, urban, and shadow (related to topography). The method used is based on encoding the two aligned rasters, converted into a single band of grayscale for 2022, using a vision-transformer deep learning model. From the features calculated for each pixel, a random forest classification model is trained separately for each year using a set of ROIs (Regions Of Interest), target polygons delineated within each of the selected classes through photo-interpretation of the original images. Model validation is performed on independent sets of polygons also defined by photo-interpretation. The maps provided in the resource are derived from the prediction of cover classes for both years using the trained and validated models. These are raw predictions, meaning that no post-processing has been applied to reduce potential noise due to classification errors. The shared resource is part of the results from the FRAG'ILE research and development program (FRAGmentation en milieu InsuLairRE, UR / CBNM/ IRD, funded by OFB, https://fragile.frama.io).

Simple

Date (Publication)
2026-01-12
Presentation form
Digital map
Purpose
To provide a historical land cover map of Réunion Island in 1950 and a recent land cover map in 2022. Since the maps were obtained using two similar approaches, their comparison allows for the assessment of the spatio-temporal dynamics of the five selected classes (forest, low vegetation, agriculture, urban, shadow).
Status
Completed
Author
  University of Reunion - Anthony Malkassian ( )
Author
  University of Reunion - Olivier Flores
Author
  IRD - Robin Pouteau
Maintenance and update frequency
As needed
Keywords
  • Land cover
  • Historical aerial imagery
  • Classification
Keywords
  • Deep learning
Access constraints
Copyright
Use constraints
License
Other constraints
License CC BY NC SA
Spatial representation type
Vector
Metadata language
English
Character set
UTF8
Topic category
  • Environment
  • Biota
Begin date
1950-01-01
End date
2012-12-31
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Reference system identifier
WGS 1984
Hierarchy level
Map
File identifier
9af88626-f791-4b61-ad49-b18e53641d6f XML
Metadata language
English
Character set
UTF8
Date stamp
2026-01-14T13:21:05
Metadata standard name
ISO 19115:2003/19139
Metadata standard version
1.0
Point of contact
  University of Reunion - Olivier Flores ( )
Custodian
  OSU-Réunion, UAR3365 - Victor K/BIDI ( Data steward )
15 avenue René Cassin, Université de la Réunion , Saint-Denis , 97744 , France
+262 262 93 82 28
 
 

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