Land Cover GIS Data from the European Space Agency

The European Space Agency has released land cover maps covering the 2000, 2005, and 2010 epochs.  Developed by ESA’s Climate Change Initiative (CCI) Land Cover team, the 300 meter resolution land cover datasets were developed from data gathered by the now defunct Envisat satellite and were developed to serve the climate modeling community.

The products released are:

1. the full archive (2003-2012) of MERIS Full Resolution time series pre-processed in 7-day composites,
2. three global LC maps representative for the 1998-2002, 2003-2007 and 2008-2012 epochs,
3. three global land cover seasonality products describing the vegetation greenness, the snow and the burned areas occurrence dynamics,
4. a global map of open and permanent water bodies at 300m spatial resolution,
5. a user tool for sub-setting, re-projecting and re-sampling the products.

All GIS data products can be freely visualized and downloaded online at http://maps.elie.ucl.ac.be/CCI/viewer.

The second phase (2014-2016) of the CCI Land Cover project will aim to:

•  improve the Phase 1 (2011-2014) achievements in terms of products, systems and validation;
• cover the 1980s, 1990s and the 2013-2016 periods with AVHRR, Sentinel-3 and Proba-V;
• demonstrate the feasibility of a higher resolution global land cover product by generating a 10-20m land cover map, over Africa, using Sentinel-2 supplemented by Landsat 8 datasets;
• extend the climate impact assessment of a better land surface description for climate modelling.