Hybrid OSM/CLCplus land cover tiles for EU countries for 2018

OpenStreetMap (OSM) effectively captures landscape boundaries, making it valuable for land cover and land use (LCLU) mapping. However, its crowd-sourced nature introduces inconsistencies, misclassifications, and overlapping features. A global assessment revealed that only 17 countries, primarily in Europe, exceed 60% data completeness, with urban areas generally better represented than rural or natural regions. 

The resulting dataset in our study represents historical OSM data from 2018 across the European Union and the United Kingdom, translating OSM elements into a standardized nomenclature of 22 LCLU classes. The methodology involves a multi-step process, including the buffering of line features, sequential rasterization at 2 m resolution, and prioritization of LULC classes to preserve small land features. The dataset integrates OSM with the pan-European CLCplus Backbone (Sentinel-2 data, https://land.copernicus.eu/en/products/clc-backbone) in areas lacking OSM coverage. 

The resulting 30 km × 30 km raster tiles contain a total of 19 land use and land cover classes and are available for all European Union countries for the reference year 2018.

A web service is also available, providing merged tiles into a single pan-European layer. The Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF can be accessed using the following address: https://geoforall.fsv.cvut.cz/st_lucas/data/osm_clcplus_2018.tif

OSM/CLCplus tiles use the following nomenclature: