The POSTEL Service Centre has produced the first global land cover map at 300 m resolution, that discriminates the land surfaces in 22 classes representatives of the continental ecosystems. It is a preliminary version that may be viewed with a zooming capacity below.

The map is derived from full resolution MERIS / ENVISAT data acquired in the period May 2005 - April 2006. It is produced in the framework of the GLOBCOVER project from ESA, which has appointed POSTEL / Medias-France as Prime Contractor for this project.

The POSTEL Service Centre has produced the geometric and radiometric preprocessing line as well as the classification line from algorithms and tools provided by Brockmann Consult, Université Catholique de Louvain and ESA. It has processed on these lines the 20 Terabytes of input data.

The map has been communicated for evaluation to the users associated to the project (FAO, JRC, UNEP, GOFC-GOLD, IGBP, EEA) during the 2nd GLOBCOVER User Consultation Workshop held last week in Rome, Italy. A consolidated version of the land cover map, taking into account the users feedback, should be available in a digital form to the public around mid-2008.

See also the ESA Web story.

The GLOBCOVER classes

The processing algorithms are described on the Land Cover page.

Read more on GLOBCOVER...

The GLOBCOVER project is funded by the Data User Element of the ESA Earth Observation Enveloppe Programme.

The following images are subset of the above 300m resolution global land cover map over various areas of the world.

Deforestation over an area of 195km x 120km in the Amazonian Forest around the city of Ariquemes (Brazil).

East coast of Madagascar

Snow near Quesnel Lake and over Cariboo Mountains (Canada).

Pays-Basque and Bearn (South West of France)