Twenty Years of Land Accounts in Europe

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...

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Detalhes bibliográficos
Autores: Ivits, Eva, Orlitova, Erika, Milego Agràs, Roger, Maucha, Gergely, Kosztra, Barbara, Mancosu, Emanuele, Fons Esteve, Jaume|||0000-0002-5513-2970, Gregor, Mirko, Löhnertz, Manuel|||0000-0002-8397-1106, Hazeu, Gerard|||0000-0002-6711-8973
Formato: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2024
País:España
Recursos:Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Repositorio:Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:ddd.uab.cat:301783
Acesso em linha:https://ddd.uab.cat/record/301783
https://dx.doi.org/urn:doi:10.3390/land13091350
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palavra-chave:Land accounts
Copernicus Land Monitoring Service
Corine Land Cover
Geospatial database
Policy support
Descrição
Resumo: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.