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Dashboard (Tableau)

Drought impact on ecosystems in Europe, 2000-2021

Dashboard (Tableau)
Prod-ID: DAS-275-en
Published 26 Oct 2021
1 min read
Monitoring drought impact on ecosystems helps to establish policy measures for enhancing ecosystem resilience to climate change and for increasing greenhouse gas removals. Between 2000 and 2021, the European Union (EU) was affected by severe droughts, with 2003, 2005, 2012 and 2019 being extreme years. Forests suffered most from severe droughts, with ca. 30,000 km2 annually. The extent of drought impacted area have fluctuated in the last two decades and it is uncertain whether the EU will be able to reduce by 2030 the area impacted by drought.

More information

Access the soil moisture dataset here:

https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/soil-moisture-deficit-during-the 

Access the vegetation productivity dataset here:

https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/annual-above-ground-vegetation-productivity 

Standardized anomalies of yearly vegetation productivity during 2000-2021 are analyzed in areas with strong drought pressure measured as precipitation shortages and low soil moisture content.

Anomalies are expressed in standard deviations compared to the long term average vegetation productivity conditions for each 500m grid cell in the EEA39 region. Negative vegetation productivity anomalies indicate vegetation productivity conditions that are less than the long term normal condition due to drought (i.e. under negative sol moisture anomalies).

The extent of the impacted area is calculated from the sum of those grid cells where the soil moisture anomaly was below -1 standard deviation and the vegetation productivity anomaly was below -0,5 standard deviation in the given year.

In order to exclude low vegetation anomaly signals in the time series, only those grid cells were considered in this analysis where the Corine Land Cover (CLC) 2000-2018 series indicated no land use change between 2000-2018.

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