This metadata refer to the 'Corine Land Cover plus Backbone' (CLCplus Backbone) which is a spatially detailed, large scale, Earth Observation-based land cover inventory. The CLCplus Backbone Raster Product is a 10m pixel-based land cover map based on Sentinel satellite time series from July 2017 to June 2019. For each pixel it shows the dominant land cover among the 11 basic land cover classes. The product has a three years update cycle and is available for the 2018 reference year.

This metadata refers to the 'Corine Land Cover Plus Backbone' (CLCplus Backbone), a spatially detailed, large-scale, Earth Observation-based land cover inventory which is produced by the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS). The CLCplus Backbone vector is a land cover map that contains vector polygon geometries (minimum mapping unit: 0.5 ha; minimum mapping width: 20 m) and is based on Sentinel satellite time series and a combination of existing reference datasets for geometries containing transportation and hydrological networks. Each polygon represents aggregated landscape objects and contains their dominant land cover among the 18 basic land cover classes. See polygon class codes in the additional information section. In addition, polygons are enriched with land cover fractions from the CLCplus Backbone raster as well as aggregated attributes based on other CLMS and Copernicus products (e.g. topography). CLCplus Backbone vector is an independent product and its thematic and geometric contents differ from CLCplus Backbone raster and Corine Land Cover. The CLCplus Backbone vector is available for the 2018 reference year.

The Copernicus High Resolution Forest Layer Tree Cover Change Mask (TCCM) 2015-2018 raster product provides information on the change between the reference years 2015 and 2018 and consists of 4 thematic classes (unchanged areas with no tree cover / new tree cover / loss of tree cover / unchanged areas with tree cover) at 20m spatial resolution and covers EEA38 area and the United Kingdom. The production of the High Resolution Forest layers was coordinated by the European Environment Agency (EEA) in the frame of the EU Copernicus programme. The High Resolution Forest product consists of three types of (status) products and additional change products. The status products are available for the 2012, 2015 and 2018 reference years: 1. Tree cover density providing level of tree cover density in a range from 0-100%; 2. Dominant leaf type providing information on the dominant leaf type: broadleaved or coniferous; 3. A Forest type product. The forest type product allows to get as close as possible to the FAO forest definition. In its original (20m) resolution it consists of two products: 1) a dominant leaf type product that has a MMU of 0.5 ha, as well as a 10% tree cover density threshold applied, and 2) a support layer that maps, based on the dominant leaf type product, trees under agricultural use and in urban context (derived from CLC and high resolution imperviousness 2009 data). For the final 100m product trees under agricultural use and urban context from the support layer are removed.

This metadata refers to the Corine Land Cover plus Backbone (CLCplus Backbone), a spatially detailed, large-scale, Earth Observation-based land cover inventory which is produced by the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS). The CLCplus Backbone is a high-resolution raster land cover map based on Sentinel-2 satellite time series. Each 10m-pixel contains the dominant land cover among the 11 basic land cover classes. See pixel class codes in the 'Additional Information' section below. The product is available from the 2018 reference year, with a first update produced for the 2021 reference year and moved to an update cycle of 2 years from 2021 onwards.

The Copernicus Persistent Snow Area (PSA) product is generated annually for the entire EEA38 and the United Kingdom, based on the Fractional Snow Cover (FSC) information. It provides the extent of the persistent snow cover, i.e. the area where snow is present throughout the hydrological year with a spatial resolution of 20 m x 20 m. This metadata refers to the PSA product distributed in raster files as tiles aligned with Sentinel-2 (UTM/WGS84) at 20 m x 20 m GSD. It is also available in another projection as tiles aligned with the Pan-European High-Resolution Layers in the European 20 m x 20 m grid (ETRS89 LAEA - EPSG: 3035). It is typically released on an annual basis with a release date in October, after the end of the hydrological year. Each product is composed of two separate files corresponding to the different layers of the product, and another metadata file. PSA is one of the products of the pan-European High-Resolution Snow & Ice service (HR-S&I), which are provided at high spatial resolution (20 m x 20 m and 60 m x 60 m), from the Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-1 constellations data from September 1, 2016 onwards.

The pan-European Very High Resolution (VHR) Image Mosaic 2018 is a seamless mosaic of the VHR 2018 dataset, based on watershed segmentation of image overlaps. The input data consists of a mix of Pleiades, SPOT, DOVE, Kompsat-4, Deimos-2, SuperView, and TripleSat images. The input imagery has been colour balanced against the Sentinel-2 based HR mosaic from 2018. Colour balancing is done through iterative histogram matching, where the first iteration is used to identify clouds and snow, and the second iteration re-balances, with the bright objects masked out. Cloud cover has been minimized through an innovative approach to cloud masking, which relies on automatically identifying and de-prioritizing overly bright areas in the resulting mosaic. Some clouds and snow remain, as all pixels have to have a value, meaning that if no cloud or snow free images were available for a given area, the bright pixels will remain. The mosaic primarily is used as input data in the production of various Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS) datasets and services, such as land cover maps and high resolution layers on land cover characteristic and can be also useful for CLMS users for visualizations and classifications on land. The input imagery for the creation of the mosaic is provided by ESA. Due to license restrictions, VHR Image Mosaic 2018 is only available as a web service (WMS), and not for data download.

The pan-European High Resolution (HR) Image Mosaic 2015 provides up to two cloud-free HR optical coverage 2 of EEA39 countries including all islands of those countries plus French Overseas Departments (DOMs) acquired within predefined windows corresponding to the vegetation season in 2014-2015. Images are derived from the following satellite sensors: Resourcesat-1/2 SPOT-5 Sentinel-2 MSI The mosaic primarily is used as input data in the production of various Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS) datasets and services, such as land cover maps and high resolution layers on land cover characteristic and can be also useful for CLMS users for visualizations and classifications on land. The input imagery for the creation of the mosaic is provided by ESA. Due to license restrictions, HR Image Mosaic 2015 is only available as a web service (WMS), and not for data download.

This metadata refers to the Copernicus High Resolution Layer Forest product Dominant Leaf Type Change (DLTC) 2015-2018. The DLTC raster product provides information on the change between the reference years 2015 and 2018 and consists of 7 thematic classes (unchanged areas with no tree cover / new broadleaved cover / new coniferous cover / loss of broadleaved cover / loss of coniferous cover / unchanged areas with tree cover / potential change among dominant leaf types) at 20m spatial resolution and covers the full of EEA38 area and the United Kingdom. The production of the High Resolution Forest layers was coordinated by the European Environment Agency (EEA) in the frame of the EU Copernicus programme. The High Resolution Forest product consists of three types of (status) products and additional change products. The status products are available for the 2012, 2015 and 2018 reference years: 1. Tree cover density providing level of tree cover density in a range from 0-100%; 2. Dominant leaf type providing information on the dominant leaf type: broadleaved or coniferous; 3. A Forest type product. The forest type product allows to get as close as possible to the FAO forest definition. In its original (20m) resolution it consists of two products: 1) a dominant leaf type product that has a MMU of 0.5 ha, as well as a 10% tree cover density threshold applied, and 2) a support layer that maps, based on the dominant leaf type product, trees under agricultural use and in urban context (derived from CLC and high resolution imperviousness 2009 data). For the final 100m product trees under agricultural use and urban context from the support layer are removed.

The pan-European Very High Resolution (VHR) Image Mosaic 2021 is a seamless mosaic of the VHR 2021 dataset. The input data consists of a mix of Pleiades, SuperView, Worldview, Kompsat-3, Kompsat-4, Geoeye, SPOT, Deimos-2, Vision-1 and TripleSat images. To enhance the appearance of the input imagery, a histogram stretch was applied, cutting off the lowest and highest 0.1 percent of the histogram values and stretching the remaining values to fit the 16-bit pixel depth. For each input image, only selected areas were used to create the mosaic, and the rest was masked out to exclude areas with clouds and their shadows. Color balance was achieved using a second-order method, which modifies all input pixels toward a set of multiple points derived from a two-dimensional polynomial parabolic surface, ensuring a seamless mosaic. For several water bodies, especially large lakes, the final result exhibited a patchy surface pattern due to presence of sun glint on the satellite images. A post-processing methodology was implemented to recalculate the digital values to produce a seamless appearance surface of some of these major lakes: Vänern and Vättern (Sweden), Oulu (Finland), Peipus (Estonia), Geneva (Switzerland/France), Constance (Switzerland/Germany/Austria), Garda and Bolsena (Italy), Skadar (Montenegro/Albania), Prespa (North Macedonia/Albania/Greece), Beysehir, Iznik and Van (Turkey). The applied methodology consisted of creating individual mosaics with the images comprising only the mentioned lakes (a mosaic per lake), calculating Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) for shoreline extraction, and color balancing each mosaic individually with all land surfaces masked out, using only pixels belonging to the water category. This approach allowed smoothing the patchy surfaces of the above-mentioned lakes considering statistics solely from the water pixels, ensuring a more uniform appearance. To enhance the visualization of the entire dataset at larger scales (greater than 1:500.000), the mosaic displays pan-European overviews generated from the pan-European Very High Resolution 2018 Image Mosaic. The updated VHR 2021 version is visualized only at scales below 1:500.000. The mosaic primarily is used as input data in the production of various Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS) datasets and services, such as land cover maps and high-resolution layers on land cover characteristic. It can be also useful for CLMS users for visualizations and classifications on land. The input imagery for the creation of the mosaic is provided by ESA. Due to license restrictions, the VHR Image Mosaic 2021 is only available as a web map service (WMS), and not for data download.

Small Woody Features are important vectors of biodiversity and provide information on fragmentation of habitats with a direct potential for restoration while also providing a link to hazard protection and green infrastructure, amongst others. VHR_IMAGE_2021 made available in the ESA Copernicus DWH was the main data source for the detection of small woody features identifiable within the given image resolution. The Small Woody Features layer contains woody linear and patchy elements but will not be further differentiated into trees, hedges, bushes and scrub. The spatial pattern shall be limited to linear structures and isolated patches on the basis of geometric characteristics. This product is a vector dataset distributed as OGC GeoPackage files, compliant with the EEA reference grid (100km x 100km).