General Land Use Cover Datasets for Europe

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AbstractThe land uses and covers of Europe are the most systematically mapped in the world today, and their associated datasets offer the greatest spatial and thematic detail. Thanks to the work done within the Copernicus Land Monitoring programme run by the European Environmental Agency (EEA) and the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission, there are many general LUC datasets covering most of the European continent. These general datasets map all land uses and covers on the ground, without focusing on any specific type. However, whereas some cover the whole of Europe, others only map specific local areas of interest, such as urban or coastal areas, riparian zones or spaces protected under the Nature 2000 network. CORINE Land Cover (CLC) is the flagship European LUC mapping programme and a reference worldwide. It has provided consistent LUC information at a detailed scale (1:100,000) every 6 years since 1990. This is the result of a high degree of coordination between many different organizations and institutions across Europe. The Copernicus programme also includes other European datasets such as Urban Atlas, N2K, Riparian Zones and Coastal Zones, which provide very detailed LUC information at higher levels of spatial detail (scale 1:10,000) for specific geographical area types: Functional Urban Areas, the Natura 2000 network, riparian zones from Strahler level 2–8 rivers and areas 10 km away from the coastline. However, these projects do not cover the same long timeframe as CLC. In addition, their long-term future is far from clear in that updates are only planned for Urban Atlas and Coastal Zones. PELCOM, GlobCorine and the Annual Land Cover Product are the European projects that most resemble the LUC maps available at global and supra-national scales for other parts of the world. They were obtained through classification of satellite imagery. PELCOM and GlobCorine are only available for a few dates and at quite coarse spatial resolutions: 1 km and 300 m respectively. The Annual Land Cover Product consists of a series of LUC maps for the period 2000–2019 at a highly detailed spatial resolution (30 m). It offers information for a large number of different points in time. However, it makes a separate classification of land uses each year, which means that change analysis with this dataset is more uncertain than with CLC or other Copernicus Land Monitoring products. HILDA and S2GLC 2017 are LUC datasets produced within the framework of different research projects, which can be considered reference products in their respective fields. HILDA provides one of the largest time series of LUC maps currently available, spanning the period from 1900 to 2010. S2GLC 2017 is one of the most spatially detailed LUC mapping experiences at a supra-national scale, with a spatial resolution of 10 m.