Landscape fragmentation is the physical disintegration of continuous ecosystems into smaller units, which is most often caused by urban or transport network expansion. Breaking structural connections between habitats results in decreased resilience of habitats and a decrease in their ability to provide various ecosystem services and support biodiversity. This dashboard enables the exploration of landscape fragmentation in 2018 in Europe.
Vegetation productivity indicates the spatial distribution and change of the vegetation cover - a key characteristic of ecosystem condition. Climatic variations are important drivers of vegetation productivity, but land use changes are even stronger. Productivity in Europe increases most due to agricultural land management and converting other lands to agriculture, whereas largest decrease is caused by sprawling urban areas. The dashboard below enables the exploration of these processes during 2000-2018.
Functional Urban Areas (FUAs) represent 22.9 % of the EU territory, but host 75 % of its population. In order to fulfil global and European policy objectives, like “no net land take by 2050”, it is advisable to establish guidance values for land use efficiency for most common settlement types, in particular for urban fringes and small towns in rural areas. Such guidance values need to consider a good balance between efficient land use and sufficient green space to allow a good quality of life. This dashboard presents land use efficiency values for FUAs, calculated as land uptake per capita corresponding to the SDG indicator 11.3.1.
Trees in urban areas have multiple benefits for human well being and for biodiversity as well as for carbon sequestration, climate change adaptation and flood protection. The below dashboard presents urban tree cover statistics for Functional Urban Areas in the EU27+UK and for the EEA 38+UK region, by countries. The dashboard will be updated every 3 years after the availability of the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service products Urban Atlas, Tree Cover Density and Street Tree Layer.
Data are supplied by the countries for the annual reports "Forest Fires in Europe, Middle East and North Africa 20nn" series.
Collection and treatment of waste water are key to reducing pressures and risks to human health and the environment, especially to rivers, lakes, and coastal waters. The European Environment Agency (EEA) has published data today, on World Toilet Day, which show that the share of urban waste waters that are collected and treated in line with EU standards is increasing across Europe.
The pan-European High-Resolution Vegetation Phenology and Productivity product suite (HR-VPP) are provided at a high spatial resolution (10 m x 10 m) with a high repeat frequency. They are derived from the optical Sentinel-2 constellation data (Sentinel-2A and Sentinel-2B) with a revisit time of 5 days. They are generated over the entire EEA39 region (33 member countries and 6 cooperating countries) from January 1 2017 onwards, with a daily, 10-daily and yearly frequency (see below).
The HR-VPP product suite contains 3 product groups, 31 product types, 1522 files and more than 900.000 tiles per year, which totals more than 80 Terra Bytes of data, per year.
This interactive data viewer provides accounts of imperviousness, i.e. land surface sealing status in Europe (EEA39 and EU27+UK) for the year 2018. Sealing is measured by the high resolution (10m) dataset "Imperviousness "of the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service.
The viewer facilitates the understanding and assessment of soil sealing, which can be queried by administrative region or the degree of urbanisation as well as by ecological units such as floodplains and coastal zones or protected areas. All disaggregated assessment level allows the query of countries and land cover classes as well.
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.
Reports from the projects leading to the revision of EUNIS habitat classification, including a detailed methodology, are available at
https://archives.eionet.europa.eu/nrc-biodiversity/library/eunis_classification/reports/reports.
Below are documents and crosswalks for Bern Convention Resolution 4 and Habitats Directive Annex I, for Corine Land Cover and for the Palaearctic habitat classification.
Crosswalk between EUNIS habitats classification 2007 and Palaearctic habitat classification 2001
Crosswalk between EUNIS habitats classification and Corine land cover
Crosswalk between EUNIS habitat classification 2007 and Habitat Directive Annex I habitat types 2008
The report includes the methodology, navigation key to level 3 and factsheets
The full list of EUNIS habitats 2012: codes, scientific names and revised descriptions. The habitat descriptions of the EUNIS classification 2007 were revised in 2012. The 2007 habitat types were not changed in the 2012 description revision which mostly replaced Palaearctic or UK Marine habitat classification codes used in habitat descriptions at levels 5 and below with their EUNIS classification equivalents.
In 2019 the classification was further amended to include two new habitats of the revised Resolution 4 of Bern Convention as adopted at the 38th Standing Committee meeting, November 2018. The two habitats are G3.4G Pinus sylvestris forest on chalk in the steppe zone and X36 Depressions (pody) of the Steppe zone.
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