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I am looking for the equivalent of CORINE land cover data sets (100 meters) for the rest of the world; not merely urban areas but any area in general. I see sousa's question unanswered so I thought I will ask again.

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  • changing the question from land cover to land use actually makes it another question. Therefore I understand that my question is unaccepted, but it also makes my answer inaccurate which is embarrassing for me. As I believe that my answer could help (e.g. for measuring the forest area destroyed by fire), I would rather suggest that you rollback your edit and post another question (land use Q is not duplicate of land cover Q). Maybe a moderator could give some advice. The other solution is to remove my answer, but I believe that not everybody knows about those datasets.
    – radouxju
    Dec 10, 2014 at 9:00
  • If an edit to the question has invalidated an answer that was provided in good faith based on the question then I think that edit should be rolled back and the Q&A resolved based on its state at that time.
    – PolyGeo
    Dec 10, 2014 at 9:18
  • @PolyGeo - So roll back the changes and ask a new question ?
    – user36959
    Dec 10, 2014 at 9:20
  • If the new question has not previously been asked here then asking it is appropriate. I would take care with its wording to make sure that it does not get confused with this one and made a duplicate of it as a result.
    – PolyGeo
    Dec 10, 2014 at 9:24
  • @gansub Thanks for choosing to add another question. I know that you did not intent to embarrass.
    – radouxju
    Dec 10, 2014 at 10:24

3 Answers 3

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The only high resolution global land cover that I know is the one done by the PR of China. In Europe they seemed to use CORINE as an ancillary data, so it is difficult to judge the consistency accross the world, but it has a spatial resolution of 30 m.

http://www.globallandcover.com/GLC30Download/index.aspx

http://unstats.un.org/unsd/default.htm

You also have the ESA dataset at 300 m.

http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2014/10/Land_cover_2010

http://maps.elie.ucl.ac.be/CCI/viewer/index.php

And for thematic datasets there are the global forest Watch (30m) and the PALSAR forest/non forest (25 m).

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  • the Chinese link is a great link. Thank you ! I was merely looking for differences in land use after say a forest fire. So the global forest watch is a great bit of information as well.
    – user36959
    Nov 24, 2014 at 7:52
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The FAO released the GLC-Share which provides a set of major thematic land cover layers resulting by a combination of “best available” high resolution national, regional and/or sub-national land cover databases. Metadata and download link here:

http://www.fao.org/geonetwork/srv/en/main.home?uuid=ba4526fd-cdbf-4028-a1bd-5a559c4bff38

Remind that both this, and the Chinese product are mainly land-cover and not land-use.

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  • It appears that the two terms are used interchangeably. Is that accurate ?
    – user36959
    Nov 24, 2014 at 9:01
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    Absolutely not. The land cover refers to the physical cover of the surface, while land use is how human activities perceive that particular land. Strictly speaking, even the term "forest" is a land-use while the land-cover should only describe the characteristics of the trees. There is a large bibliography on this subject, but have a look to the Wikipedia page to have an idea. Nov 24, 2014 at 9:15
  • Then I am not sure whether my question is answered. I was looking for the equivalent of CORINE land use data sets for non urban areas. Will the above URLs cover those scenarios?
    – user36959
    Nov 24, 2014 at 9:32
  • It is very hard to say, especially without knowing the purpose of your analysis. My experience is that you should compare two different datasets with a lot of cautions. Nov 24, 2014 at 10:48
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The Global Land Cover 2000 (GLC2000) dataset from the EC-JRC might also be a useful reference landcover dataset, even if it is a little dated now...

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