Levin, G., Gyldenkærne, S. 2022. Estimating Land Use/Land Cover and Changes in Denmark. Technical documentation for the assessment of annual land use/land cover and changes since 2011. Aarhus University, DCE – Danish Centre for Environment and Energy, pp 39. Technical Report No. 227 http://dce2.au.dk/pub/TR227.pdf
Due to Denmark’s ratification of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol, Denmark is obliged to document sequestration and emission of carbon dioxide from land use and land cover and changes in these. For this purpose, methods were developed aiming at estimating amounts and changes in land use and land cover for Denmark since 1990. According to the IPCC guidelines, estimation of land use and land cover must cover following land use and land cover categories: Settlement, cropland, grassland, wetland, which is fully water covered, wetland, which is partly water covered, forestland and other land. Since the first assessment for the period from 1990 to 2012 (Levin et al., 2014), several methodological adjustments have been compiled to estimate annual land use and land cover and annual changes in theses for the period from 2011 to 2020. The present report describes applied data and methods.
Since 2011, annual estimations of land use and land cover categories and changes in these are based on existing categorical (i.e. pre-classified) geo-graphical information. This information includes topographical maps, agricultural registers and field parcel maps, data from nature and habitat monitoring and maps of wetland restoration. After pre-processing, such as removal of geometrical errors, all input data are converted into raster layers with a cell size of 25x25 meters and combined into one land use/land cover map for the specific year. Since input data often spatially overlap, their combination into one map is based on an evaluation of the thematic and geometric precision of each layer. Finally, for the whole period from 1990 to 2020, estimations of changes in land use and land cover are presented and discussed.
