EEA activities

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Page Last modified 21 Feb 2017

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Topics: Land use

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To understand the relationship between land use and environmental impacts, information is needed at different scales — global, European and national. Land-use data are also a prerequisite for spatial planning at local and regional level. EEA activities focus mainly on Europe's landscape and spatial change assessments by using land and ecosystem accounting tools and geographic information system analysis. EEA has also been tasked to develop an environmental data centre for land use as a contribution to a shared environmental information system for Europe (SEIS).

Land use

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Copernicus land monitoring service

Land use data centre

The EEA supports the spatial requirements of EU thematic strategies on marine systems and soils, amongst others, and pays particular attention to land-use changes in ecologically sensitive areas and protection of soils.

The European Topic Centre on Land Use and Spatial Information (ETC-LUSI) provides the EEA with technical support in developing relevant indicators, carrying out the Corine land cover inventories, land and ecosystem accounting (LEAC) applications and geospatial analysis.

The main EEA data source is the Corine land cover data set that has been produced for 1990, 2000 and 2006. It is based on established cooperation with the member countries and the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) system.

Based on spatial information, the land accounts produced by the EEA provide assessments of the magnitude of the various types of change and, at the same time, of their distribution over the European territory.

Land use is often part of analyses of other topics, such as climate change adaptation, river basin management, prospective analysis, consumption and production patterns, coastal zones and the urban environment.

The EEA has also developed interactive maps and multimedia products including a land cover data viewer. Land-related terms can be checked in Eionet's GEMET Thesaurus.

Looking into the future, PRELUDE (PRospective Environmental analysis of Land Use Development in Europe) is an interactive tool presenting a set of five different land-use scenarios for Europe.