Corine Land Cover (CLC) 2012 and CLC change 2006-2012 are two of the datasets produced within the frame of

the Initial Operations of the Copernicus programme (the European Earth monitoring programme previously known as GMES) on land monitoring.

Corine Land Cover (CLC) provides consistent information on land cover and land cover changes across Europe. This inventory was initiated in 1985

(reference year 1990) and established a time series of land cover information with updates in 2000 and 2006 being the last one the 2012 reference year.

CLC products are based on photointerpretation of satellite images by national teams of participating countries - the EEA member and cooperating countries

- following a standard methodology and nomenclature with the following base parameters: 44 classes in the hierarchical three level Corine nomenclature;

minimum mapping unit (MMU) for status layers is 25 hectares; minimum width of linear elements is 100 metres; minimum mapping unit (MMU) for Land Cover Changes

(LCC) for the change layers is 5 hectares. The resulting national land cover inventories are further integrated into a seamless land cover map of Europe.

Land cover and land use (LCLU) information is important not only for land change research, but also more broadly for the monitoring of environmental change,

policy support, the creation of environmental indicators and reporting. CLC datasets provide important datasets supporting the implementation of key priority

areas of the Environment Action Programmes of the European Union as protecting ecosystems, halting the loss of biological diversity, tracking the impacts of

climate change, assessing developments in agriculture and implementing the EU Water Framework Directive, among others. More about the Corine Land Cover (CLC)

and Copernicus land monitoring data in general can be found at http://land.copernicus.eu .