All official European Union website addresses are in the europa.eu domain.
See all EU institutions and bodiesDo something for our planet, print this page only if needed. Even a small action can make an enormous difference when millions of people do it!
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.