TY - JOUR
T1 - Twenty Years of Land Accounts in Europe
AU - Ivits, Eva
AU - Orlitova, Erika
AU - Milego, Roger
AU - Maucha, Gergely
AU - Kosztra, Barbara
AU - Mancosu, Emanuele
AU - Fons, Jaume
AU - Gregor, Mirko
AU - Löhnertz, Manuel
AU - Hazeu, Gerard
PY - 2024/9
Y1 - 2024/9
N2 - Land use and its change impact food security, carbon cycling, biodiversity, and, hence, the condition of ecosystems to mitigate and adapt to climate change, support economic prosperity, and human well-being. To support and guide policy actions between the economy and the environment, harmonized time series datasets, transparent methodologies, and easily interpretable statistics are needed. Therefore, monitoring of the function and condition of lands and their change, along with properly agreed methodologies and freely accessible data, are essential. The Copernicus Land Monitoring Service has produced over 20 years of Corine Land Cover datasets for 39 countries in Europe, which allows continental-wide harmonized and comparable monitoring and accounting of land cover and land use change at a high thematic resolution and in a long time series (2000–2018). With the upcoming 2024 update, the time series will reach a unique product worldwide in terms of time series length, spatial resolution, extent, and thematic detail, enabling policymakers and the scientific community to address the main anthropogenic drivers of land and ecosystem degradation. This paper describes a unified approach for producing continental-wide land accounts that aligns with internationally agreed-upon standards for measuring the environment and its relationship with the economy. Furthermore, the study provides a harmonized time series of geospatial data for deriving land accounts and provides statistics of land cover and land use status and changes for a twenty-year period. All geospatial data and statistics presented in this paper are freely accessible and downloadable to serve other studies.
AB - Land use and its change impact food security, carbon cycling, biodiversity, and, hence, the condition of ecosystems to mitigate and adapt to climate change, support economic prosperity, and human well-being. To support and guide policy actions between the economy and the environment, harmonized time series datasets, transparent methodologies, and easily interpretable statistics are needed. Therefore, monitoring of the function and condition of lands and their change, along with properly agreed methodologies and freely accessible data, are essential. The Copernicus Land Monitoring Service has produced over 20 years of Corine Land Cover datasets for 39 countries in Europe, which allows continental-wide harmonized and comparable monitoring and accounting of land cover and land use change at a high thematic resolution and in a long time series (2000–2018). With the upcoming 2024 update, the time series will reach a unique product worldwide in terms of time series length, spatial resolution, extent, and thematic detail, enabling policymakers and the scientific community to address the main anthropogenic drivers of land and ecosystem degradation. This paper describes a unified approach for producing continental-wide land accounts that aligns with internationally agreed-upon standards for measuring the environment and its relationship with the economy. Furthermore, the study provides a harmonized time series of geospatial data for deriving land accounts and provides statistics of land cover and land use status and changes for a twenty-year period. All geospatial data and statistics presented in this paper are freely accessible and downloadable to serve other studies.
KW - Copernicus Land Monitoring Service
KW - Corine Land Cover
KW - geospatial database
KW - land accounts
KW - policy support
U2 - 10.3390/land13091350
DO - 10.3390/land13091350
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85205290443
SN - 2073-445X
VL - 13
JO - Land
JF - Land
IS - 9
M1 - 1350
ER -