Land cover | icgc

Land cover

High-resolution cartographic information on the types of landcover in Catalonia such as built-up areas, agricultural areas, forests, bodies of water...

Main characteristics

  • Spatial resolution: 1 m.
  • Thematic resolution: 41 classes.
  • Information date: 2009, 2018 and 2019-2022.
  • Available formats:
    • GeoPackage with built-in styles and default project for QGIS.
    • GeoTIFF without compression with color table where the value of each pixel identifies the class (encoding according to specifications) to allow parsing.

 

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This cartography is under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. 
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Details

The Land cover of 2009 are mainly a simplification to 41 classes of the Land cover Map of Catalonia v4 of 2009 prepared by CREAF, apart from an adaptation to the data model approved by the Cartographic Coordination Commission of Catalonia which allows the comparison between that geoinformation and the later one.

The 2018 Land cover are an update of the 2009 Land cover, made from the photointerpretation of the ICGC 2018 orthophotos. Changes greater than 2 ha identified by comparison of LANDSAT images from two years, the changes coming from the 1:5,000 Topographical Base of the ICGC, as well as the bases of forest fires and SIGPAC, of ​​this period. The layer of changes between 2012 and 2018 of the Corine Landcover has also been considered and special attention has been paid to the categories Crops in Transformation and Zones in Transformation of the 2009 version due to their great dynamics.

Exceptionally, due to the large volume of changes in the agricultural areas of Lleida and the area along the coast from Tarragona to Barcelona, ​​only agricultural changes larger than 5 ha have been photographed. A sample of 811 points across the delivery territory has been monitored, resulting in a thematic quality, or level of match between an independent tag and the tagging of the team that performed the large update changes 2009-2018, of 81%. The Land cover model in raster format, or rectified mesh format, is only used as a data structure in which to store the data transformed from the Land cover in vector format, through interpolation processes.

The 2022 Land cover correspond to the update of the previous layer (2018). The update has been carried out by photointerpretation of the most recent orthophotos available at each time for each work area (each polygon on the Land cover Map indicates the date of the orthophoto used), making a review of the entire territory and consulting available layers to confirm some cases, such as the SIGPAC of 2023, the Habitats Map of Catalonia, the Canopy Height Model, the Surfaces affected by forest fires, etc. All the changes detected were considered, with a minimum area of ​​500 m2.