Evaluation of Open-source Land Use Land Cover products through SWAT Simulation

Land use land cover (LULC) datasets serve as essential and foundational spatial information for a wide range of hydrological applications. However, the availability of these datasets from various sources, each employing different algorithms and techniques, poses a significant challenge for hydrological modelling. These variations can influence the identification of hydrological features and affect the accuracy of model simulations. This study aimed to comparatively assess and evaluate openly source available LULC products ESRI LULC, ESA World Cover LULC and Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO)-Bhuvan for the simulation of watershed hydrology by setting up a hydrological model using Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT). The evaluation was conducted for the Ong River watershed, a forest-cropland-dominated region within the Mahanadi River basin in India, covering an area of 4,650 sq. km. Various performance evaluation metrics were employed to assess the effectiveness of the LULC datasets, including Willmott's Index of Agreement, Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE), Coefficient of Determination (R²), Percent Bias (PBIAS), and the RMSE-observations standard deviation ratio (RSR). Our research provides valuable insights for selecting appropriate LULC datasets for hydrological modeling, considering the unique characteristics of the catchment and the desired level of accuracy.