European tree canopy cover, coarse yearly view (Copernicus)
What it measures. Shows what share of each area is covered by tree crowns, from 0% (no trees) to 100% (fully shaded by canopy), summarised over roughly 100-metre squares.
How it's made. A coarsened version of the detailed Copernicus map, generated yearly from 2018 onward by the EU's Copernicus Land Monitoring Service across 38 European countries.
How & where you'd use it. Useful for tracking forest extent and density at regional and national scales, supporting land-use planning, conservation reporting, and climate work.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2018-01-01 → 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 Tree Cover Density (TCD) dataset provides information on the proportional crown coverage per pixel at 100 meter spatial resolution and ranges from 0% (all non-tree covered areas) to 100%, whereby Tree Cover Density is defined as the "vertical projection of tree crowns to a horizontal earth’s surface\“. This product is an aggregation of its corresponding high resolution dataset. This dataset is provided annually starting with 2018 in 100 meter rasters (fully conformant with the EEA reference grid) in 100 x 100 km tiles covering the EEA38 countries. High Resolution Layer Tree Cover and Forest product is part of the European Union’s Copernicus Land Monitoring Service.
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_tree-cover-density_europe_100m_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