European Validation of Land Cover Changes in CLC2006 Project

CORINE Land Cover 2006 is the third European Land Cover inventory (1990s, 2000 and 2006). The number of participating countries is increasing, at present being 38. Countries (CH, IS, NO, TR) not participating previous CLC inventories have joined the CLC2006 project. The project is co-financed by the EEA and the member countries and covers 5,8 million km 2 of the European continent. Project was implemented by national teams. A Technical Team under ETCLUSI was responsible for technical follow-up of the project. For production of CLC-Change20002006 database “change-mapping first” visual photo-interpretation technology was applied by majority of countries. Scandinavian countries replaced part of labour-intensive photo-interpretation with GIS and image processing. CLC2006 database was usually produced in GIS by adding together revised CLC2000 and CLC-Change2000-2006. National teams used multi-temporal (2 coverages) SPOT-4/5 and/or IRS-P6 imagery to derive the minimum 5 ha land cover changes that occurred between 2000 and 2006. Ortho-corrected satellite images provided a solid geometrical basis for mapping land cover changes based on the standard CLC nomenclature. Results show that land cover changed on 1,25% of the surface of Europe between 2000 and 2006, which is equivalent to the size of Lithuania. Forestry changes (forest felling and growth) constitute the largest change area as well as they provide the highest number of change polygons. Stratified random sampling was used for validating the database of CLC-Change2000-2006, being the first change validation exercise in the history of CLC. The obtained 87,8%±3,3% overall accuracy (calculated using commission error only) based on 2405 samples is satisfying. Omission error was not possible to measure due to the very large sample size required, being the consequence of small change percentage.