When European grasslands were mown each year (Copernicus)
What it measures. Records the calendar dates of each mowing event on temporary and permanent grassland, capturing up to four separate cuts per year across Europe.
How it's made. Produced yearly from 2017 onward by the EU's Copernicus Land Monitoring Service at 10-metre resolution, with a smallest mapped patch of a quarter hectare, across Europe's 38 countries, including French overseas territories.
How & where you'd use it. Useful for studying farming intensity, grassland management, and the timing of hay and silage cuts, which matter for ground-nesting birds and biodiversity.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2017-01-01 → ongoing
- Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
What you can do with it
- Map vegetation, forests and biomass
- Monitor ecosystem productivity and carbon
- Support habitat and biodiversity studies
Official description
The High Resolution Layer Grassland Mowing Dates (GRAMD) raster product provides at pan-European level in the spatial resolution of 10 m a basic land cover classification, flagging and mapping the start date (DOY) (GRAMD) within the detected Herbaceous cover layer (temporal and permanent grassland)) with a Minimum Mapping Unit (MMU) of 0.25 ha. The GRAMD product will flag and map the dates (Day of Year) of each mowing event on temporary or permanent grassland per year, resulting in a product split in four different rasters per year. This dataset is provided annually starting with 2017 in 10 meter rasters (fully conformant with the EEA reference grid) in 100 x 100 km tiles covering the EEA38 countries. High Resolution Layer Grasslands product is part of the European Union’s Copernicus Land Monitoring Service. This dataset includes data from the French Overseas Territories (DOMs).
Get the data
# ESA Copernicus Data Space — open STAC API (free account)
from pystac_client import Client
cat = Client.open("https://stac.dataspace.copernicus.eu/v1")
search = cat.search(
collections=["clms_vlcc_grassland-mowing-dates_europe_10m_yearly_v1"], # add _cog or _nc for a format variant
bbox=(-10, 35, 30, 60), # your area (W,S,E,N)
datetime="2024-01-01/2024-12-31",
)
items = list(search.items()) # then read assets with rioxarray / xarray Browsing the Copernicus STAC is open; downloading bytes needs a free Copernicus Data Space account.
Official links
- Open data source Copernicus STAC