Earth Data School
About
Full catalog/clms_vlcc_herbaceous-cover_europe_10m_yearly_v1
clms_vlcc_herbaceous-cover_europe_10m_yearly_v1·dataset

Map of grassy, non-woody plant cover across Europe (Copernicus)

CLMS VLCC Herbaceous Cover (HER) Europe 10m yearly V1
biosphere ESA ESA Copernicus active
In plain English

What it measures. Splits the land into two classes: areas covered by herbaceous vegetation (grasses and other soft, non-woody plants, whether temporary or permanent) and everything else.

How it's made. Produced yearly from 2017 onward, mainly from a base vegetation analysis, by the EU's Copernicus Land Monitoring Service at 10-metre resolution across Europe's 38 countries, including French overseas territories.

How & where you'd use it. An intermediate building block used to create Europe's grassland maps; on its own it shows where soft, grassy vegetation grows across the continent.

What's measured

CLMSCopernicusEuropeRasterLand coverLand useGrasslandHerbaceousHER

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 Herbaceous Cover (HER) dataset provides a basic land cover classification with 2 thematic classes (temporal and permanent herbaceous / non-herbaceous). The production of the herbaceous layer is primarily based on the probability estimates obtained from the Base Vegetation Layer (BVL) which also serves to harmonize the different vegetated HRL products (Grasslands, Tree Cover and Forests, Croplands). HER is further used as input for the Grassland status layer (GRA) extracting the permanent herbaceous in combination with the Ploughing indicator (PLOUGH). This dataset is provided annually starting in 2017 with 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

copernicus_access.py
# 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_herbaceous-cover_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.