ESA WorldCover

The European Space Agency (ESA) WorldCover product provides global land cover maps for the years 2020 and 2021 at 10 meter resolution based on the combination of Sentinel-1 radar data and Sentinel-2 imagery. The discrete classification maps provide 11 classes defined using the Land Cover Classification System (LCCS) developed by the United Nations (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The map images are stored in cloud-optimized GeoTIFF format.

The WorldCover product is developed by a consortium of European service providers and research organizations. VITO (Belgium) is the prime contractor of the WorldCover consortium together with Brockmann Consult (Germany), CS SI (France), Gamma Remote Sensing AG (Switzerland), International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (Austria), and Wageningen University (The Netherlands).

Two versions of the WorldCover product are available:

• WorldCover 2020 produced using v100 of the algorithm

  • WorldCover 2020 v100 User Manual
  • WorldCover 2020 v100 Validation Report

• WorldCover 2021 produced using v200 of the algorithm

  • WorldCover 2021 v200 User Manual
  • WorldCover 2021 v200 Validaton Report

Since the WorldCover maps for 2020 and 2021 were generated with different algorithm versions (v100 and v200, respectively), changes between the maps include both changes in real land cover and changes due to the used algorithms.