Creation of a detailed land use land cover product for the territory of the European Union based on OpenStreetMap and CLCplus data

Although satellite data with subdecimal spatial resolution is becoming widely available, producing land cover products from them remains uncommon, especially at national or continental scales. This study proposes an alternative to detailed land use land cover mapping without using satellite data, utilising the freely available OpenStreetMap instead. While OpenStreetMap does not necessarily contain such information per se, it has been used in previous studies, typically at local scales with limited thematic or spatial resolution. This paper focuses on achieving high thematic and spatial resolution at national to continental scales. The OpenStreetMap processing workflow includes harmonization and translation of polygon and linear features, spatial tiling for efficient processing, rule-based rasterisation at 2 m, and gap-filling unmapped areas using the CLCplus Backbone dataset. The methodology was applied across all European Union countries for 2018 and 2022. The resulting two-meter hybrid OSM/CLCplus land use/cover product with 19 classes is made freely available.