Centre for Landscape and Climate Research UK Corine Land Cover Map 2012 Heiko Balzter

Centre for Landscape and Climate Research History of Corine UK The UK has contributed to all previous CORINE Land Cover (CLC) maps. Previous CLC projects have adopted a bottom up approach using generalisation of the national land cover products. All previous updates of the CLC maps have been carried out by the Natural Environment Research Council’s (NERC) Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH). CLC1990 was produced for the UK in two separate administrative units: Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) and Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland using different methods. CLC2000 was produced for the full UK, by semi-automated generalisation of the Land Cover Map CLC2006 was again produced for the full UK by semi-automated generalisation of the Land Cover Map 2007 in Great Britain by 1Spatial and by conventional update of the CLC2000 in Northern Ireland. For CLC2012 there is no national UK land cover product, so a visual interpretation approach using satellite imagery has been adopted following the technical guidelines from the European Environment Agency (EEA). 2

Centre for Landscape and Climate Research CLC 2012 CLC2012 has been produced by the University of Leicester (UoL) with support from Specto Natura Ltd. (SN). Historically, there has only been limited awareness and use of CLC in UK government due to the availability of a reasonably contemporaneous national land cover product with superior spatial resolutions and a nomenclature aligned to UK applications. However, LCM2007 is now out of date, so more users may turn to CLC2012. The production team was: – Prof. Heiko Balzter, Dr. Geoff Smith, Dr. Beth Cole, Dr. Booker Ogutu, Diane Palmer and Sophie King. Training by EEA was received at start of production. 3

Centre for Landscape and Climate Research Problems Persistent cloud cover led to delays in delivery of HRLs Also, gaps in GIO data layers had to be filled Different acquisition dates were mosaicked together, which made interpretation complicated Some bugs in the EEA in-house software (Interchange) had to be identified and fixed Difficulties in obtaining input data, e.g. LCM2007 from CEH Staff turnover and time pressure on delivery due to limited resources 4

Centre for Landscape and Climate Research Image2012 Number of available images in 2011, 2012 and 2013 and the Image2012 mosaic. Second coverage: 5

Centre for Landscape and Climate Research Training visit outcomes The training visit report by EEA made the following recommendations: 1.Interpretation should start despite the gaps in IMAGE 2012 data for the UK. Subsequent image acquisition in 2013 will be needed. AWiFS monthly composites were recommended to gap fill, however, these were not available for the UK. 2.Possible changes between arable and pasture land were not possible to check because of the lack of multi-seasonal imagery. 3.Separation of the two grassland types (231-pastures and 321-natural grasslands) must be done on land parcel structure, also the separation of moors and heaths (322) and peatlands (412) requires in-situ data. 4.CLC2006 contains lots of thematic and topological mistakes that need to be mapped as revisions in order to derive real change. 5.Google Earth (GE) imagery was an efficient tool in checking the validity of a CLC2006 polygon and interpreting change. Use of GE data is important because no national orthophotos are available. 6.The use of Coverage -2 data for IMAGE 2012 is recommended when it becomes available for the UK. 6

Centre for Landscape and Climate Research CLC2006 Corrections, corrections and more corrections… UK LCM2007 vector topology was not available to the team Polygon boundaries did not match Image2006 interpretation 7

Centre for Landscape and Climate Research Dominant corrections to CLC2006 8

Centre for Landscape and Climate Research Production process Production units follow Ordnance Survey grid squares (right) Mosaicking is required to stitch together the final CLC map tiles. Remapping along the edges is necessary to smooth the polygons. Slow process due to the database size. 9

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Centre for Landscape and Climate Research Change layer polygons of change, representing 167 different change types that cover an area of 225,238 ha (1% of total area of the UK) 11

Centre for Landscape and Climate Research Dominant change types 12

Centre for Landscape and Climate Research Level 2 aggregated change 13

Centre for Landscape and Climate Research Level 1 aggregated change 14

Centre for Landscape and Climate Research Dominant land cover in

Centre for Landscape and Climate Research Outlook on Copernicus Copernicus next generation service framework review User requirements Access to Image2012 data stream Cloud cover makes the case for SAR to augment optical imaging Multi-scale land cover mapping? (Semi-)automatic land cover change detection between CLC? 16

Centre for Landscape and Climate Research Sentinel-1 SAR for land cover 17 Hybrid level 2/3 CLC classes over Erfurt, Thuringia, Germany