Comparison of CORINE Land Cover Data with National Statistics and the Possibility to Record This Data on a Local Scale—Case Studies from Slovakia

Abstract

Monitoring of land cover (LC) provides important information of actual land use (LU) and landscape dynamics. LC research results depend on the size of the area, purpose and applied methodology. CORINE Land Cover (CLC) data is one of the most important sources of LU data from a European perspective. Our research compares official CLC data (third hierarchical level of nomenclature at a scale of 1:100,000) and national statistics (NS) of LU in Slovakia between 2000 and 2018 at national, county, and local levels. The most significant differences occurred in arable land and permanent grassland, which is also related to the recording method and the development of agricultural land management. Due to the abandonment of agricultural areas, a real recorded increase in forest cover due to forest succession was not introduced in the official records of Land register. New modification of CLC methodology for identifying LC classes at a scale of 1:10,000 and fifth hierarchical level of CLC is firstly applied for local case studies representing lowland, basin, and mountain landscape. The size of the least identified and simultaneously recorded area was established at 0.1 ha the minimum width of a polygon was established at 10 m, the minimum recorded width of linear elements such as communications was established at 2 m. The use of the fifth CLC level in the case studies areas generated average boundary density 17.2 km/km2, comparing to the 2.6 km/km2 of the third level. Therefore, when measuring the density of spatial information by the polygon boundary lengths, the fifth level carries 6.6 times more information than the third level. Detailed investigation of LU affords better verification of national statistics data at a local level. This study also contributes to a more detailed recording of the current state of the Central European landscape and its changes.

Cropland Abandonment in Slovakia: Analysis and Comparison of Different Data Sources

“…The CORINE Land Cover dataset [26,75,76] and the Landsat images [2,77,78] were used for analysing the land use changes in various countries. The advantage of the CLC is its detailed temporal and thematic resolution, but it has the disadvantage of low spatial resolution and low sensitivity to land cover change [41,79], especially for arable land and permanent grasslands [80]. Therefore, the CLC is suitable for describing the trends, locality and relative magnitude of change, while the Landsat data based on the images with 30 m spatial resolution is more appropriate for estimation of the actual magnitude of change.…”

Mountain Landscape Dynamics after Large Wind and Bark Beetle Disasters and Subsequent Logging—Case Studies from the Carpathians

“…The land cover databases for years 2000, 2006, 2012 and 2018 at a scale of 1:100,000 were downloaded from the Copernicus programme (the CLC inventory). In the CLC, the size of the least identified area was set at 25 ha, minimum width of polygon was 100 m and minimum change polygon was 5 ha [14]. The layers were geoprocessed by clip tool to extract input features for the chosen national parks.…”

“…The patterns of land cover were delimited after the interpretation of orthophoto mosaics in case studies using manual vectorization in ArcMap 10.7 (© ESRI). We adopted the minimum mapped area of 0.1 ha, minimum width of polygon 10 m and minimum recorded width of linear elements such a communication, accompanying vegetation and streams 2 m. [14]. The minimum change polygon was determined in an analogy to the generally applied CLC methodology of the third level as a fifth of the minimum identified area with the size of 0.02 ha [36].…”

Analyzing the uncertainty of the CORINE Land Cover time series (1990-2018) for Spain

“…The CORINE Land Cover project, hereinafter CORINE, can be considered the most relevant European LUC database because of its history (the project dates back to 1985), comprehensive coverage (up to 38 countries in the last update), method of production (photointerpretation or data generalization) and degree of detail (Minimum Mapping Unit of 25ha and 5ha for changes) (Falt'an et al, 2020;García-Álvarez and Florina Nanu, 2022). Although new, more detailed and accurate LUC products have been recently generated as part of the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service, such as the High Resolution Layers (HRL) or the Urban Atlas, CORINE remains as a valuable and unique source of LUC information because of its rich time series (García-Álvarez and Florina Nanu, 2022).…”