GlobCover Portal

The ESA GlobCover Portal offers comprehensive access to global land cover maps, a key output of the GlobCover project. This initiative, launched by the European Space Agency in 2005 with partners like JRC, EEA, and FAO, aimed to develop a service for delivering global composites and land cover maps. The project utilized observations from the 300m MERIS sensor aboard the ENVISAT satellite mission, providing valuable data for environmental monitoring and research.

The portal makes available land cover maps covering two distinct periods: December 2004 - June 2006 and January - December 2009. Users can directly download these products, including a GeoTIFF format for the GlobCover 2009 map and zip files containing the global land cover data along with detailed product descriptions and validation reports. These datasets are crucial for various geospatial applications requiring broad-scale land classification.

The GlobCover products, processed by ESA and the Université Catholique de Louvain, are freely available for educational and scientific purposes. Users are required to credit both organizations as the source and provide a link to the ESA DUE GlobCover website. For scientific publications utilizing the data, acknowledgement of the ESA GlobCover 2009 Project and an electronic copy of the publication are requested. Commercial use requires prior approval from ESA.