Overview

In the early 1980s, the European Commission identified the need for a harmonized, detailed, and consistent data set on land use and occupation in Europe. The national maps that existed until then were highly inconsistent, resulting in a lack of data comparability across countries, which in turn hampered continental-scale environmental monitoring.

As a solution, the European Commission launched the CORINE (Coordination of Information on the Environment) programme to develop a standardized methodology for producing land cover maps at the European scale. Thus, the first CORINE Land Cover (CLC) dataset was published in 1990. Over time, this dataset has become a core product of the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS), providing crucial information on land cover and use in Europe for more than three decades.

The CLC is a pan-European database containing geospatial land cover information. Its data model is based on a hierarchical classification of 44 thematic classes, organized into three levels.

The product is updated periodically, with versions in 2000, 2006, 2012, and 2018, following a six-year cycle. Each update includes:

• Status layers, which represent land use at a given time.
• Change layers, which highlight changes in land use compared to the previous version.

The CLC is a highly important tool for a variety of applications, including environmental monitoring, territorial planning, and climate change assessments. Given its continuity and standardized methodology, this product remains a benchmark at the European level, ensuring consistent and comparable data across countries.

More information here.