CLCplus Backbone 2021 (raster 10 m), Europe, 3-yearly - FGI GeoCubes Europe COG in EPSG:3857

CLCplus Backbone 2021 (raster 10 m), Europe, 3-yearly - FGI GeoCubes Europe COG in EPSG:3857 original data source: https://land.copernicus.eu/en/products/clc-backbone (DOI: https://doi.org/10.2909/71fc9d1b-479f-4da1-aa66-662a2fff2cf7).

Provides a pan-European spatially consistent and seamless, detailed land cover inventory for the 2018 reference year, for each pixel showing the dominant land cover among the 11 basic land cover classes in Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) file formats stored in Finnish Geospatial Research Institute's (FGI) Geocubes Europe.

GeoCubes Europe builds upon the concept of GeoCubes Finland, which was originally developed as part of the of the Finnish Open Geospatial Information Infrastructure for Research (oGIIR, nowadays Geoportti) initiative. GeoCubes Europe serves as a harmonised, multi-resolution repository of raster-based geospatial data. Its primary goal is to facilitate spatial analysis processes by providing interoperable data sets that have been pre-processed for easy access and integration.

GeoCubes Europe contains a curated selection of geospatial data sets with coverage across Europe. These datasets are transformed into a common two dimensional grid and aligned to a unified set of resolution levels. 

GeoCubes Europe applies the following resolution levels: 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500, 1000 and 10000 m. These rounded resolution values, rather than the traditionally used exponents of two in image pyramids, are selected to facilitate integration with external sources (like statistical data sets) and to follow the values commonly used in spatial analysis reporting. For easy transfer and processing of the GeoCubes Europe data sets, the content is subdivided in 1000 km x 1000 km blocks.

A so-called virtual raster mechanism is used to treat these individual files as a single, continuous data set. Data is stored in Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) file formats, with each file representing a 1000 km x 1000 km block. The resolution levels are stored as internal GeoTIFF overview layers. The set of blocks is aggregated into a single content representation by using the GDAL's (Geospatial Data Abstraction Library) Virtual format (VRT) mechanism.

Direct link to VRT file: https://aquainfra-fgi.a3s.fi/europe/clcplus_3857/2021/clcplus3857_2021.vrt