Enabling Advanced Land Cover Analytics: An Integrated Data Extraction Pipeline for Predictive Modeling With the Dynamic World Dataset

Abstract

Understanding land cover holds considerable potential for a myriad of practical applications, particularly as data accessibility transitions from being exclusive to governmental and commercial entities to now including the broader research community. Nevertheless, although the data is accessible to any community member interested in exploration, there exists a formidable learning curve and no standardized process for accessing, preprocessing, and leveraging the data for subsequent tasks. In this study, we democratize this data by presenting a flexible and efficient end-to-end pipeline for working with the Dynamic World dataset, a cutting-edge near-real-time land use/land cover (LULC) dataset. This includes a preprocessing and representation framework which tackles noise removal, efficient extraction of large amounts of data, and re-representation of LULC data in a format well suited for several downstream tasks. To demonstrate the power of our pipeline, we use it to extract data for an urbanization prediction problem and build a suite of machine learning models with excellent performance. This task is easily generalizable to the prediction of any type of land cover and our pipeline is also compatible with a series of other downstream tasks. To facilitate further research and validation, all code and data used in this study are made available online.