At the occasion of ESA’s Living Planet symposium in Milano this week, the Copernicus Global Land Service team proudly released their new set of global land cover layers for the year 2015.

The main classification with 23 classes, 10 flexible fractional cover layers, the forest type layer and associated quality indicators are primarily based on fused 100 m and 300 m PROBA-V satellite observations, combined with a few renowned external datasets from JRC and DLR, for surface water and settlement layers, and crowd-sourced information from IIASA’s Geo-Wiki for classification training and independent validation.

Moreover, the entire computation runs on the technology of PROBA-V’s Mission Exploitation Platform (MEP) and is still expanding, for instance to provide annual updates.

In this example, we superimpose a PROBA-V image, that covers parts of Belgium and the Netherlands and was acquired in April 2015, with the new Land Cover classification.

Discover everything you need to know about these products
and the new land cover viewer in the following blog,
'Time to release the new and improved Land Cover maps'.