WorldCover

With an ever-changing environment the need for accurate, timely and high-resolution information on land use/land cover and its changes has increased tremendously over the past years. However, until nrecently regional or continental land cover maps were solely based on high-resolution optical earth observation data, such as from Sentinel-2 or Landsat, while the use of SAR observations, such as from Sentinel-1 in the production of large area land cover maps is still in its infancy.

For this purpose, the European Space Agency (ESA) initiated the WorldCover project which released a freely accessible global land cover product at 10 m resolution for 2020 in October 2021. This map is based on both Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 observations. The WorldCover project has the objective to produce, deliver and validate a global 10 meter resolution global land cover (LC) map within 3 months of the last data acquisition, with a minimum of 10 land cover classes and a minimum overall accuracy of 75%.

A crucial aspect for WorldCover was the involvement of several end users active in different domains who provided primary input for all engineering aspects and followed the whole project workflow from design up to validation and uptake. Consequently, WorldCover intends to provide a substantial benefit to various user communities, expands the established global land cover user base, and supports the development of novel services.

For more information about the algorithms used, the product data content and how you can access the data, please follow this link.

In Figure 1 an example of the WorldCover 2020 LC over Western Europe is shown.

WorldCover 2020 example
Figure 1: WorldCover 2020 Land Cover classes over Western Europe.