The AGIT conference is held every year and serves as a gathering place for the geoinformatics community. It brings together researchers and professionals to talk about the latest trends in GIS, geospatial methods, and applied geoinformation. This year, AGIT will be in Salzburg, Austria, from 8 to 9 July 2026. Our team will present a short paper on how well OpenStreetMap works for monitoring land use and land cover in Germany. The presentation will focus on how complete, up-to-date, and accurate OpenStreetMap is compared to official land-use and land-cover data.
Short paper: Fitness for purpose of OpenStreetMap for land-use/land-cover monitoring in Germany: Evaluating Completeness, Currentness and Thematic Accuracy
Authors: Sven Lautenbach, Levi Szamek, Benjamin Herfort, Sylvia Pscheidl, Jan Tore Reifenrath, Jonas Danner, Alexander Zipf, Mathias Schaub
In Germany official land use land cover monitoring is currently based on a mix of information from earth observation products and ordnance survey maps. This study investigates the potential of land use information from OpenStreetMap to supplement the official data set. Our focus is thereby on completeness, currentness and thematic accuracy against the administrative land-use/land-cover product. User activity is used as an additional indicator.