LUISA Base Map 2012

The LUISA Base Map 2012 is a high-resolution land use/land cover map developed and produced by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. It corresponds to a modified and improved version of the CORINE Land Cover 2012 map. Compared to CORINE, the LUISA Base Map delivers a higher overall spatial detail and finer thematic breakdown of artificial land use/cover categories (17 categories instead of 11 in CORINE). The LUISA Base Map can be used for multiple purposes and it is more suitable than CORINE for applications requiring fine spatial and/or thematic detail of land use/land cover consistently across Europe, such as land use/cover accounting and modelling. Coverage: EU27, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iceland, Kosovo, Liechtenstein, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Norway, Serbia, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom. RESOLUTION: MMU = 1ha (artificial surfaces); MMU = 5ha (non artificial surfaces); pixel resolution = 50m, 100m LINEAGE: The 2012 edition of the LUISA Base Map is constructed by refining the original thematic and spatial detail of the CORINE Land Cover (CLC) 2012. The methodology consists of a structured, automated and reproducible geospatial data fusion approach that integrates disparate but highly detailed land use information from a series of trusted, off-the-shelf datasets onto the CLC 2012 map, relying on data from the reporting year 2012 whenever possible. The main sources include the CLC Change Maps, the Copernicus High Resolution Layers (forest, water, wetlands, and imperviousness layers), the Copernicus Urban Atlas and Coastal Zones, the European Settlement Map 2012 from the Joint Research Centre, as well as the TomTom Multinet and OpenStreeMap. The use of various European-wide remotely sensed imagery as input and a uniform and automated methodology yields high comparability of the map across countries. The LUISA Base Maps 2012 and 2018 were produced using the same method and data sources. However, input data from 2012 and 2018 may not be always comparable. This is especially the case of the Copernicus High Resolution Layers whose sensors and algorithms changed between 2012 and 2018. For this reason, the LUISA Base Maps are not suitable for change detection. For what concerns the accounting of changes in urban fabric for larger geographical units (e.g. NUTS), the effect of differences in input data is limited because the LUISA Base Map uses the Copernicus Imperviousness change layers to detect meaningful changes of urban fabric backwards, using 2018 as the reference period. COMPLETENESS: 100%