CLC+ Backbone: Set the Scene in Copernicus for the Coming Decade

With the CLC+ product suite as part of the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS), the European Environment Agency (EEA) has initiated a true paradigm change in European land cover/land use monitoring, building on the 30-years-long rich legacy of the European CORINE Land Cover (CLC) flagship product. The CLC+ Backbone, as first component of the upcoming CLC+ era, will feature an object-oriented wall-to-wall high-resolution inventory of European land cover and its characteristics in unprecedented quality and detail, for the reference year 2018. It will comprise a pan-European combined “hardbone” and “soft-bone” segmentation of vector-based stable landscape objects and a raster-based classification of 11 EAGLE compliant land cover classes at 10m spatial resolution. To this end, a combination of image segmentation and Deep Learning approaches are implemented within a cloud-based infrastructure for a fully integrated analysis of optical/radar time series of Sentinel-1/-2 satellite imagery and auxiliary data. Vector and raster datasets will be fused into a fully attributed, 18 land cover class, vector product with 0.5 ha minimum mapping unit (MMU), additionally incorporating a multitude of further information layers derived from satellite data and various other Copernicus products.