Science

May 20, 2025

Land Cover User Tool v5.0 Now Available!

The ESA Land Cover project release an enhanced version User Tool v5.0

The ESA Land Cover cci team is pleased to announce the release of User Tool v5.0, an enhanced version of our dedicated utility for transforming and customising land cover data from the ESA Climate Change Initiative. Access it now via the UCLouvain Land_Cover_cci viewer and download page under “User Tool”.

What’s New in V5.0?

This optimised release supports the full suite of MRLC_cci map products, including:

  • The global Plant Functional Types (PFT) dataset 1992–2020 (Harper et al., 2023)
  • The Water Bodies v4.0 layer
  • The Land Cover Condition products

Key Functionalities

User Tool v5.0 enables advanced sub-setting and transformation operations to tailor the Land_Cover_cci suite of products to your regional or thematic needs:

  • Sub-setting, re-projection, and re-sampling of MRLC_cci products
  • Legend conversion from the LCCS classification to user-defined PFTs using global or regional cross-walking tables
  • Ranking of land cover classes by fractional area within each target cell, writing the top n classes to separate output bands
  • Output of fractional area maps for each land cover class
  • Output of fractional area maps for each plant functional type (PFT)
Global distribution of natural grasses Plant Functional Type (PFT) at 0.25° spatial resolution. The map was derived using the User Tool v5.0, which resampled the 2011 PFT dataset from the ESA CCI Medium Resolution Land Cover map series
Global distribution of natural grasses Plant Functional Type (PFT) at 0.25° spatial resolution. The map was derived using the User Tool v5.0, which resampled the 2011 PFT dataset from the ESA CCI Medium Resolution Land Cover map series. The processing was performed with the <code>./remap.sh</code> function of the User Tool v5.0, applied to the file <code>ESACCI-LC-L4-LCCS-Map-300m-P1Y-2011-v2.0.7cds.nc</code>

Stay tuned for further improvements and releases!

References

Harper, K.L., Lamarche, C., Hartley, A., Peylin, P., Ottlé, C., Bastrikov, V., San Martín, R., Bohnenstengel, S.I., Kirches, G., Boettcher, M., Shevchuk, R., Brockmann, C., Defourny, P., 2023. A 29-year time series of annual 300m resolution plant-functional-type maps for climate models. Earth Syst. Sci. Data 15, 1465–1499.

Land_Cover_cci Plant Functional Types Dataset

The PFT v2.0.8 global dataset has 14 layers, each describing the percentage cover (0–100%) of a plant functional type at a spatial resolution of 300 m:

  • Broadleaved evergreen trees
  • Broadleaved deciduous trees
  • Needleleaved evergreen trees
  • Needleleaved deciduous trees
  • Broadleaved evergreen shrubs
  • Broadleaved deciduous shrubs
  • Needleleaved evergreen shrubs
  • Needleleaved deciduous shrubs
  • Natural grasses
  • Herbaceous cropland (i.e., managed grasses)
  • Built
  • Water
  • Bare areas
  • Snow and ice

Download it on the CEDA catalogue