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There is much interest in using volunteered geographic information (VGI) in formal scientific analyses. This analysis uses VGI describing land cover that was captured using a web-based interface, linked to Google Earth. A number of control points, for which the land cover had been determined by experts allowed measures of the reliability of each volunteer in relation to each land cover class to be calculated. Geographically weighted kernels were used to estimate surfaces of volunteered land cover information accuracy and then to develop spatially distributed correspondences between the volunteer land cover class and land cover from 3 contemporary global datasets (GLC-2000, GlobCover and MODIS v.5). Specifically, a geographically weighted approach calculated local confusion matrices (correspondences) at each location in a central African study area and generated spatial distributions of user's, producer's …