Corine Land Cover Europe (2012)

CORINE Land Cover (CLC) is a geographic land cover/land use database encompassing most of the countries of Europe. In 1985 the Corine programme was initiated in the European Union. Corine means 'coordination of information on the environment' and it was a prototype project working on many different environmental issues. The Corine databases and several of its programme have been taken over by the EEA. One of these is an inventory of land cover in 44 classes organised hierarchically in three levels, and presented as a cartographic product, at a scale of 1:100 000. The first level (5 classes) corresponds to the main categories of the land cover/land use (artificial areas, agricultural land, forests and semi-natural areas, wetlands, water surfaces). The second level (15 classes) covers physical and physiognomic entities at a higher level of detail (urban zones, forests, lakes, etc), finally level 3 is composed of 44 classes. CLC was elaborated based on the visual interpretation of satellite images (SPOT, LANDSAT TM and MSS). Ancillary data (aerial photographs, topographic or vegetation maps, statistics, local knowledge) were used to refine interpretation and the assignment of the territory into the categories of the CORINE Land Cover nomenclature. The smallest surfaces mapped (minimum mapping units) correspond to 25 hectares. Linear features less than 100 m in width are not considered. The scale of the output product was fixed at 1:100.000. Thus, the location precision of the CLC database is 100 m. CLC2012 is the 4th CORINE Land Cover inventory and took 3 years to finalize. A dual coverage of satellite images were used. The number of countries using advanced (bottom-up) solutions has slightly increased. All of the EEA39 countries have participated. CLC2018 is now available here.