Land use land cover high resolution map (10 m) for the area of Tori-Bossito, Benin, 2010-2011

This dataset is a high spatial resolution Land Use / Land Cover (LULC) map of the region of Tori-Bossito, southern Benin. Its spatial resolution is 10 m. It was produced in 2011 and made available for a wide range of uses.

It has been produced to study the environmental determinants of the presence and abundance of three malaria mosquito species.

It contains 14 land cover classes: Freshwater, Herbswamp, Aquatic grassland, Coco tree, Eucalyptus tree, Thicket, Palm tree, Savanna, Teak tree, Pineapple, Degraded riparian forest, Degraded surfaces, Rain-fed agriculture, Forest.

The method used to generate the map involved a supervised object-based image classification using mono- and multi-spectral SPOT 5 satellite products from 2010, ground-truth data (> 200 plots) acquired by fieldwork (2010-2011), and nearest-neighbor classifier. The classification accuracy was 98%.

In addition to the LULC georeferenced raster data, we propose the following files in this release:

• the raster attribute table, as an .ods (libreoffice) file, including names and definitions of the land cover classes in both English and French ;
• a QGIS layer style file (.qml) for visualizing the raster in QGIS ;
• two color map files (.clr) (English and French) to be used in a variety of GIS software ;
• the map as a .png miniature image ;
• representative pictures of the land cover classes.

The methodology used to generate the data was detailed in french in Moiroux 2012 (https://theses.hal.science/tel-00812118, p. 79-85 ) and in English, in a more concise way in Moiroux et al. 2013 ( https://doi.org/10.1186/1756-3305-6-71).