Pan-European Forest/Non-Forest Mapping for the Reference Years 1990 and 2000

Forest area and the forest spatial pattern of forest are two of the sustainable forest management indicators in Europe. Whereas forest area estimates are commonly derived from national forest statistics, the analysis of spatial pattern of forests, i.e. information on the size or shape of forests in a landscape, requires detailed information about the spatial distribution of the forests. For large area scale, this information can be derived with the help of satellite remote sensing. This paper presents a forest mapping methodology that was applied in the mapping of European forest for two different reference dates, i.e. for the target years 1990 and 2000. The mapping was based on freely available Landsat image data sets, CORINE Land Cover 2000 and on an in-house developed automatic image processing chain. The map for year 2000 was validated against an independent reference point data set and compared to reported national forest area statistics. The paper presents the methodology in detail and illustrates the results for both reference dates.JRC.H.7-Land management and natural hazard