ESA WorldCover 2021

ESA WorldCover 2021
Global land cover product at 10 m resolution for 2021
based on Sentinel-1 and 2 data

Info

The ESA WorldCover Team is proud to announce the release of the WorldCover 2021 product at 10m resolution.

Inspired by the 2017 WorldCover conference organized by ESA, the cardinal requirements are:

fast generation and validation of a world land cover based on Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-1 constellations
10 land cover classes + mangroves
10m resolution
10 months from last data take
77% overall accuracy, independently validated

The WorldCover products are delivered in a regular latitude/longitude grid (EPSG:4326) with the ellipsoid WGS 1984 (Terrestrial radius=6378 km). The legend includes 11 generic classes that appropriately describe the land surface at 10m: "Tree cover", "Shrubland", "Grassland", "Cropland", "Built-up", "Bare / sparse vegetation”, “Snow and Ice”, “Permanent water bodies”, “Herbaceous Wetland”, “Mangrove” and “Moss and lichen".

Visualise

Considering the heavy download of the WorldCover map at 10m, a web interface was developed to mainly visualize and interact with data. A left click, anywhere on the layer, highlights the LC-Map label of the selected pixel in the legend description of the left panel.

Go to the viewer

Download

In this section a world map sliced in 18 equal areas is visualised and the user can select and download one of the tiles (60° x 60°) of the WorldCover map at 10m in 7zip format. Please ensure that you have the appropriate internet connection and computer capacity.

Download product

Validation

The ESA WorldCover product has been independently validated by Wageningen University (statistical accuracy) and IIASA (spatial accuracy). The WorldCover 2021 v200 product reaches an overall accuracy of 76.7%. For more details please see the Product Validation Report.

Consortium

The WorldCover consortium consists of a group of highly experienced major European service providers and research organizations, covering all relevant aspects of land cover mapping including the validation. The consortium has a long track record of collaboration in diverse European and ESA projects, as well as the Copernicus Land and Climate Change Service.

WorldCover has five key end-user which are an integral part of the project and will follow the whole project workflow from design up to validation and uptake.