Woody Vegetation Layer 2021 (raster 5 m), Europe, 3-yearly, Sep. 2025

English

The Woody Vegetation Layer is a new product that aims at providing information about presence or absence of woody vegetation of any type across Europe without any differentiation of height, size or nature and without masking forested areas. It includes isolated trees or permanent crops such as orchards. This helps users understand the distribution of these features across different regions and provide an “all tree layer” that users can use to derive their own application. The production of the HRL Small Landscape Features is coordinated by EEA in the frame of Copernicus, the Earth observation component of the European Union’s Space programme.

The product is a raster dataset with 5-meter grid spacing (spatial resolution), distributed as 100 x 100 km tiles that are fully conformant with the EEA reference grid.

Identification info

Date (Publication): 2025-09-30

Edition: 01.00

Citation identifier: copernicus_r_3035_5_m_wvl-2021_p_2021-2022_v01_r00

Identifier

Code: 10.2909/7fba3498-71d1-45bc-a76e-0ca4a237b21c

Spatial representation type: Grid

Spatial resolution

Spatial resolution: 5 m

Topic category

Environment

Extent

Temporal extent

Time period: 2021-01-01 2022-12-31

Maintenance and update frequency: As needed

GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0

Land cover

Continents, countries, sea regions of the world.

GEMET

Spatial scope

European

EEA topics

Land use

Resource constraints

Access constraints: Other restrictions

Other constraints: no limitations to public access

Resource constraints

Use constraints: Other restrictions

Other constraints

The Copernicus component is governed by Regulation (EU) No 2021/696 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 28 April 2021 establishing the Union Space Programme and the European Union Agency for the Space Programme and repealing Regulations (EU) No 912/2010, (EU) No 1285/2013 and (EU) No 377/2014 and Decision No 541/2014/EU. Within the Copernicus component, a portfolio of land monitoring activities has been delegated by the European Union to the European Environment Agency (EEA) and the DG Joint Research Centre of the European Commission.

The Copernicus land monitoring products and services are made available on a principle of full, open and free access, as established by the Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) No 1159/2013 of 12 July 2013.

Free, full and open access to the products and services of the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service is made on the conditions that:

1. When distributing or communicating Copernicus Land Monitoring Service products and services (data, software scripts, web services, user and methodological documentation and similar) to the public, users shall inform the public of the source of these products and services.

2. Where the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service products and services have been adapted or modified by the user, the user shall clearly state this.

3. Users shall make sure not to convey the impression to the public that the user's activities are officially endorsed by the European Union.

Language: English

Character encoding: UTF8

Distribution Information

Distribution format

GeoTIFF

OnLine resource: CLMS Website

Download (requires authentication)

OnLine resource: Product Information & Technical Documentation

OnLine resource: HRL_WoodyVegetationLayer_2021

HRL_WoodyVegetationLayer_2021

OnLine resource

Data quality info

Hierarchy level: Dataset

Report

Result

Title: Commission Regulation (EU) No 1089/2010 of 23 November 2010 implementing Directive 2007/2/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council as regards interoperability of spatial data sets and services

Date (Publication): 2010-12-08

Explanation: See the referenced specification

Resource lineage

Statement

The HRL Small landscape feature suite is primarily based on a deep learning classification of satellite image time-series from VHR_IMAGE_2021 and Sentinel-2. The VHR_IMAGE_2021 dataset, collected from ESA’s DWH, was resampled to 2m spatial resolution and converted to 8-bit COG format for bulk automated image processing.

The VHR imagery contains multispectral (RGB+NIR) products (2-4m spatial resolution) acquired between 2020 and 2022, in ETRS89-LAEA projection (EPSG:3035).

Geometric specifications: there are no geometric specifications or mapping rules applied to this product. It includes forested areas, it may include tree plantations such as olive trees (with the exception of vineyards). The positional accuracy is less than 5 m.

Quality assurance follows the ISO 9001:2015 standards for Quality Management and comprises of dedicated procedures of quality checks (QA breakpoints) during implementation of the production chain, in order to keep persistent control over the various stages of production, assure fitness-for-purpose of the end-products and that all quality requirements are fulfilled. Priority has been given to the target thematic accuracy to be achieved by each product, as well as to the issues of product consistency (spatial, thematic, temporal) and homogeneity.

Quality Assessment: The quality assessment has been performed according to INSPIRE Data Specifications. The data quality elements considered are: (i) Completeness, (ii) Logical Consistency, (iii) positional accuracy, (iv) Thematic Accuracy, (v) Temporal quality and (vi) Usability.

Accuracy assessment approach: stratified random point sampling. Interpretation of sampling points has been performed on the best available reference data. The general accuracy level of the HRL SWF SLF products shall be in the order of 80 % or more for Overall thematic Accuracy, User’s Accuracy and Producer’s Accuracy.