The European Space Agency (ESA) WorldCover 10 m 2020 product provides a global land cover map for 2020 at 10 m resolution based on Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data. The WorldCover product comes with 11 land cover classes, aligned with UN-FAO's Land Cover Classification System, and has been generated in the framework of the ESA WorldCover project, part of the 5th Earth Observation Envelope Programme (EOEP-5) of the European Space Agency.
The WorldCover 2020 v100 product is developed by a consortium lead by VITO Remote Sensing together with partners Brockmann Consult, CS SI, Gamma Remote Sensing AG, IIASA and Wageningen University.
The ESA WorldCover 10m 2020 V100 is provided per 3 x 3 degree tile, 2651 in total. Each tile contains a set of 2 Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) files corresponding to the following data layers:
• Map: Land cover map with 11 classes
• InputQuality: Three band GeoTIFF providing three per pixel quality indicators of the Sentinel1 and Sentinel-2 input data
Tiles are provided in EPSG:4326, geographic projection (latitude/longitude CRS).
For more information on the ESA WorldCover product and details on how to use the data please see the Product User Manual for WorldCover 2020 v100.
Data publication: 2021-10-20
Citation:
To cite these maps as data source in your publication, please add:
WorldCover 2020 v100
Zanaga, D., Van De Kerchove, R., De Keersmaecker, W., Souverijns, N., Brockmann, C., Quast, R., Wevers, J., Grosu, A., Paccini, A., Vergnaud, S., Cartus, O., Santoro, M., Fritz, S., Georgieva, I., Lesiv, M., Carter, S., Herold, M., Li, Linlin, Tsendbazar, N.E., Ramoino, F., Arino, O., 2021. ESA WorldCover 10 m 2020 v100. (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5571936)
Contact points:
Resource Contact: ESA/VITO/Brockmann Consult/CS/GAMMA Remote Sensing/IIASA/WUR
Resource Contact: European Space Agency
Metadata Contact: FAO-Data
Data lineage:
The ESA WorldCover product has been independently validated by Wageningen University (statistical accuracy) and IIASA (spatial accuracy). The WorldCover 2020 v100 reaches an overall accuracy of 74.4% on a global scale. For more details please see the Product Validation Report V1.0.
The ESA WorldCover 10m 2020 v100 product has been updated by the ESA WorldCover 10m 2021 v200 product to 2021 but is produced using an improved algorithm version (v200) compared to the 2020 map. Consequently, since the WorldCover maps for 2020 and 2021 were generated with different algorithm versions (v100 and v200, respectively), changes between the maps should be treated with caution, as they include both real changes in land cover and changes due to the algorithms used.
Resource constraints:
The ESA WorldCover product is provided free of charge, without restriction of use.
If you are using the data as a layer in a published map, please include the following attribution text:
Publications, models and data products that make use of these datasets must include proper acknowledgement, including citing the datasets and the journal article as in the following citation.
© ESA WorldCover project 2020 / Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2020) processed by ESA WorldCover consortium.
Online resources:
Data access
WorldCover Product User Manual V.1.0
WorldCover Product Validation Report V1.0
Worldwide land cover mapping website
