A Review of Assessing the Impact of UAV Images for Land Cover Analysis

Land cover maps are an important tool to understand global change and various landscape analyses. Accurate land cover maps are important for their precise application in forest conservation and snow-melt analysis. Satellite images are used as a data source for preparing land cover maps. This review evaluates the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) as an alternative technology to produce a more accurate land cover map. Throughout the comparative study it is found that higher spatial resolution of the images generally leads to improved overall accuracy of the land cover product. UAV images are found to have the highest overall accuracy compared to other satellite imagery. The review also highlighted that UAV images are not feasible from an economic perspective if the land cover analysis needs to be carried out over a large area. Therefore, it is concluded that UAVs are a good alternative tool for high-precision, local-scale land cover mapping, but satellite imagery is suitable for regional and global monitoring.