Jan Tomas Gerard Gabriel - European Landscape Dynamics

EUROPEAN
LANDSCAPE
DYNAMICS

CORINE LAND COVER DATA

CORINE LAND COVER DATA

Edited by:

JAN TOMAS GERARD GABRIEL

FERANEC SOUKUP HAZEU JAFFRAIN

Cover design by Martina Drbalkova.

CRC Press
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Version Date: 20160513

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Feranec, J. (Jan), 1951- editor.

Title: European landscape dynamics : CORINE land cover data / edited by Jan

Feranec, Tomas Soukup, Gerard Hazeu, and Gabriel Jaffrain.

Description: Boca Raton, FL : CRC Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016009525 | ISBN 9781482244663 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Landscape assessment--Europe. | Land cover--Europe. | Land
use--Europe. | CORINE Biotopes Project

Classification: LCC GF91.E85 E87 2016 | DDC 304.2094--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016009525

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Ut Omnes Videant

Across Europe and the world, accelerating rates of urbanisation, changing demographic and consumption patterns, technological changes, deepening market integration, and climate change place unprecedented demands on land. Yet the availability of land is finite. This imbalance is unsustainable, as stated in the latest report on the State and Outlook of Europes Environment published by the European Environment Agency (EEA) in 2015.

Limiting land takedefined as the amount of agriculture, forest, and semi-natural land taken by urban and other artificial land developmentis already an important policy objective at a national or subnational level. At the European Union (EU) level, the 2020 road map to a resource-efficient Europe proposes a number of milestones on land and soil. Furthermore, the target as set out in the 7th Environment Action Programme of the European Union is to achieve no net land take by 2050.

The regular CoORdination of INformation on the Environment (CORINE) Land Cover (CLC) inventories proved to be an essential source for monitoring land cover (LC) and land use (LU) change in Europe. Since 1986 national teams from 39 European countries that are members of the European Environmental Information and Observation Network (EIONET) have been working closely together with the EEA and in particular with the CLC technical unit to monitor changes within the European landscape.

After the feasibility study carried out in 1985 as part of the European experimental program for CORINE, Portugal was the first country to map its entire territory based on the standard European CORINE nomenclature and methodology for LC mapping. Other EU member states followed soon after, and CLC became one of the flagship activities of the EEA. This resulted ultimately in the systematic availability of long-term time series of high-quality comparable trans-boundary data of LC and LC changes across Europe for all EEA member and collaborating countries. A stable European nomenclature with the flexibility of refinement toward national or local needs contributed to the success of CLC as a reference dataset for monitoring the dynamics of the European landscape across borders.

Over time, the methodology for mapping LC and LC changes was adapted to benefit from the technological improvements of satellite-based observations, image processing, in situ data handling, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Consequently the visual interpretation of printouts of low-resolution Landsat MSS satellite imagery was gradually replaced by advanced computer-assisted photointerpretation of multitemporal high-resolution satellite data made accessible through a European spatial data infrastructure. In parallel, from 2006 onwards, the CLC inventories were synchronized with the LU and LC area frame surveys LUCAS, which provide indispensable in situ data on ground truth for verification and statistical validation of the CLC data.

As a result of these improvements, but also due to the consolidation of a real LC expert network across Europe, the data collection and processing time for a full coverage of the European territory covering 6 million km2 has been reduced from 10 years in the 1990s to three years for the survey of 2012. The EU Copernicus program launched in 2014 is aiming to accelerate the process even further by reducing the time between satellite data acquisition and the final product to 1 year, and, more importantly, offering decision makers and industries up-to-date information for better policies and competitive business initiatives. In addition, complementary high-resolution data on LC characteristics related to imperviousness, forest types, wetness, and so forth are today collected on a regular basis through the Copernicus land monitoring service to provide more detailed information about the composition of each CLC unit. The new Sentinel 2 satellites are especially equipped with tailored spectral bands and broad geographical coverage for improving the frequency and the quality of the images used for land monitoring.

Today, CLC is recognized as a well-established, reliable information source to support environment policies and beyond.

In line with its open data policy, the EEA, in close partnership with EIONET, is making these data available to a very broad user community free of charge. As a result, the CLC data are year after year one of the most downloaded datasets from the EEA website. This results in a large uptake by the public as well as by the commercial sector, which is using the CLC data in combination with other biophysical and socioeconomic data for a wide range of applications. The range of applications is very broad covering environmental impact assessment, nature conservation, natural capital accounting, climate change adaptation, agriculture, transport, energy, education, and many others.