Land cover
High-resolution cartographic information on the types of landcover in Catalonia such as built-up areas, agricultural areas, forests, bodies of water...
Main characteristics
- Spatial resolution: 1 m.
- Thematic resolution: 41 classes.
- Information date: 2009, 2018, 2019-2022 and 2023.
- Available formats:
- GeoPackage with built-in styles and default project for QGIS.
- GeoTIFF without compression with color table where the value of each pixel identifies the class (encoding according to specifications) to allow parsing.
Imatge
| This cartography is under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. More information |
Details
The 2009 Land Covers are mainly a simplification to 41 classes of the Land Cover Map of Catalonia v4 of 2009 prepared by CREAF, in addition to an adaptation to the data model approved by the Cartographic Coordination Commission of Catalonia that allows the comparison between that geoinformation and the later one.
The 2018 Land Covers are an update of the 2009 Land Covers, made from the photointerpretation of the orthophotos of the ICGC 2018. Changes greater than 2 ha identified by comparison of LANDSAT images of the two years, changes from the ICGC 1:5,000 Topographic Base, as well as the forest fire and SIGPAC bases, from this period, have been considered. The layer of changes between 2012 and 2018 of the Corine Land Cover has also been considered and special attention has been paid to the categories Crops in Transformation and Areas in Transformation of the 2009 version due to their great dynamics.
Exceptionally, due to the large volume of changes in the agricultural areas of Lleida and the coastal area from Tarragona to Barcelona, only agricultural changes greater than 5 ha have been photointerpreted. A supervision has been carried out on a sampling of 811 points throughout the territory that is delivered, resulting in a thematic quality, or level of coincidence between an independent labeling and the labeling of the team that has carried out the update of major changes 2009-2018, of 81%. The Land Cover model in raster format, or rectified mesh format, is only used as a data structure in which to store the data transformed from the Land Cover in vector format, through interpolation processes.
The 2022 Land Cover corresponds to the update of the previous layer (2018). The update has been carried out by photointerpretation of the most recent orthophotos available at any time for each work area (each polygon of the Land Cover Map indicates the date of the orthophoto used), making a review throughout the territory and consulting available layers to confirm some cases, such as the 2023 SIGPAC, the Habitats Map of Catalonia, the Canopy Height Model, the Surfaces affected by forest fires, etc. All detected changes have been considered, with a minimum area of 500 m2.
The 2023 Land Covers are an update of the 2022 Land Covers, made from the photointerpretation of the 2023 ICGC orthophotos in the change zones greater than 2 ha. The detection of changes has been made from semi-automatic processes by comparing Sentinel-2 images between the years considered, by the differences of the urban areas with the 2023 orthophoto using Deep Learning classification techniques, by the updates of the SIGPAC crops and the consultations in the forest fire databases of this period. The changes in the Crops in Transformation and Areas in Transformation categories of the 2022 version have also been reviewed.