This land cover classification of Germany was created using Sentinel-2 imagery from the years 2015 to 2017 and LUCAS 2015 in-situ reference data (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/lucas). It contains seven land cover types: (1) artificial land, (2) open soil, (3) high seasonal vegetation, (4) high perennial vegetation, (5) low seasonal vegetation, (6) low perennial vegetation and (7) water with a spatial resolution of 10m x 10m. For further information, please see the following publication: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jag.2020.102065

The Sentinel-2 fractional vegetation cover (fCover) product for the Netherlands was produced as part of the NextGEOSS project at the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The goal is to derive abundance maps from atmospherically corrected Sentinel-2 multispectral images for: photosynthetically active vegetation (PV); and for combined non-photosynthetically active vegetation (NPV) and bare soil (BS). The fCover product for the Netherlands has been generated by processing 10 cloud-free Sentinel-2 tiles which covered the country on 8 September 2016. The map has a spatial resolution of 60m x 60m. The Sentinel-2 scene classification layer was used to ensure that the spectral unmixing was only performed on areas of vegetation or soil. The abundance maps were made by performing MESMA unmixing on each pixel from an endmember library of PV and combined NPV + BS spectra. The purest pixels in a scene, called endmembers, were extracted using the Spatial-Spectral Endmember Extraction (SSEE) approach. The PV and NPV+BS endmembers were classified with a random forest approach and selected to form the spectral library. The spectral library was used in the µMESMA unmixing to get the PV and NPV+BS abundances.

The World Settlement Footprint (WSF) 2019 is a 10m resolution binary mask outlining the extent of human settlements globally derived by means of 2019 multitemporal Sentinel-1 (S1) and Sentinel-2 (S2) imagery. Based on the hypothesis that settlements generally show a more stable behavior with respect to most land-cover classes, temporal statistics are calculated for both S1- and S2-based indices. In particular, a comprehensive analysis has been performed by exploiting a number of reference building outlines to identify the most suitable set of temporal features (ultimately including 6 from S1 and 25 from S2). Training points for the settlement and non-settlement class are then generated by thresholding specific features, which varies depending on the 30 climate types of the well-established Köppen Geiger scheme. Next, binary classification based on Random Forest is applied and, finally, a dedicated post-processing is performed where ancillary datasets are employed to further reduce omission and commission errors. Here, the whole classification process has been entirely carried out within the Google Earth Engine platform. To assess the high accuracy and reliability of the WSF2019, two independent crowd-sourcing-based validation exercises have been carried out with the support of Google and Mapswipe, respectively, where overall 1M reference labels have been collected based photointerpretation of very high-resolution optical imagery.

This dataset includes the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) derived from Sentinel-2 imagery. Using the Google Earth Engine, all granules with a cloud cover below 60% were used as input. Cloudy pixels (referring to quality layer QA60) were masked as well. Eventually, a median mosaic was composed over the whole observation period. It was also used as input for a land cover classification (see: Land Cover DE - Sentinel-2 - Germany, 2015).

This raster dataset shows forest canopy cover loss (FCCL) in Germany at a monthly resolution from September 2017 to September 2024. It is similar to the product developed by Thonfeld et l. (2022) but was fully reprocessed and updated to reveal the most recent forest disturbance dynamics. The combination of Sentinel-2A/B and Landsat-8/9 data allows for a high temporal resolution while the pixel size of the product is 10 m. The results are clipped to the stocked area 2018 mapped by the Johann-Heinrich-von-Thünen Institute (Langner et al. 2022, https://doi.org/10.3220/DATA20221205151218). The dataset contains predominantly larger canopy openings resulting from different drivers but also larger clusters of standing deadwood. FCCL can result from abiotic (e.g. wind, fire, drought, hail) drivers, biotic (e.g. insects, funghi) drivers or a combination of both as well as from sanitary and salvage logging and planned harvest. The first version with canopy cover losses from January 2018 - April 2021 (Thonfeld et al. 2022) can be accessed here: https://geoservice.dlr.de/web/datasets/tccl.

Grassland mowing dynamics (i.e. the timing and frequency of mowing events) have a strong impact on grassland functions and yields. As grasslands in Germany are managed on small-scale units and grass grows back quickly, satellite information with high spatial and temporal resolution is necessary to capture grassland mowing dynamics. Based on Sentinel-2 data time series, mowing events are detected throughout Germany and annual maps of the grassland mowing frequency generated. The grassland mowing detection approach operates per pixel, including preprocessing of the Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) time series and a calibrated rule-based grassland mowing detection which is specified in more detail in Reinermann et al. 2022, 2023.

This landcover map was produced as an intermediate result in the course of the project incora (Inwertsetzung von Copernicus-Daten für die Raumbeobachtung, mFUND Förderkennzeichen: 19F2079C) in cooperation with ILS (Institut für Landes- und Stadtentwicklungsforschung gGmbH) and BBSR (Bundesinstitut für Bau-, Stadt- und Raumforschung) funded by BMVI (Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure). The goal of incora is an analysis of settlement and infrastructure dynamics in Germany based on Copernicus Sentinel data. This classification is based on a time-series of monthly averaged, atmospherically corrected Sentinel-2 tiles (MAJA L3A-WASP: https://geoservice.dlr.de/web/maps/sentinel2:l3a:wasp; DLR (2019): Sentinel-2 MSI - Level 2A (MAJA-Tiles)- Germany). It consists of the following landcover classes: 10: forest 20: low vegetation 30: water 40: built-up 50: bare soil 60: agriculture Potential training and validation areas were automatically extracted using spectral indices and their temporal variability from the Sentinel-2 data itself as well as the following auxiliary datasets: - OpenStreetMap (Map data copyrighted OpenStreetMap contributors and available from htttps://www.openstreetmap.org) - Copernicus HRL Imperviousness Status Map 2018 (© European Union, Copernicus Land Monitoring Service 2018, European Environment Agency (EEA)) - S2GLC Land Cover Map of Europe 2017 (Malinowski et al. 2020: Automated Production of Land Cover/Use Map of Europe Based on Sentinel-2 Imagery. Remote Sens. 2020, 12(21), 3523; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12213523) - Germany NUTS administrative areas 1:250000 (© GeoBasis-DE / BKG 2020 / dl-de/by-2-0 / https://gdz.bkg.bund.de/index.php/default/nuts-gebiete-1-250-000-stand-31-12-nuts250-31-12.html) - Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2019), processed by mundialis Processing was performed for blocks of federal states and individual maps were mosaicked afterwards. For each class 100,000 pixels from the potential training areas were extracted as training data. An exemplary validation of the classification results was perfomed for the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia as its open data policy allows for direct access to official data to be used as reference. Rules to convert relevant ATKIS Basis-DLM object classes to the incora nomenclature were defined. Subsequently, 5.000 reference points were randomly sampled and their classification in each case visually examined and, if necessary, revised to obtain a robust reference data set. The comparison of this reference data set with the incora classification yielded the following results: overall accuracy: 91.9% class: user's accuracy / producer's accuracy (number of reference points n) forest: 98.1% / 95.9% (1410) low vegetation: 76.4% / 91.5% (844) water: 98.4% / 92.8% (69) built-up: 99.2% / 97.4% (983) bare soil: 35.1% / 95.1% (41) agriculture: 95.9% / 85.3% (1653) Incora report with details on methods and results: pending

The product shows tree canopy cover loss in Germany between January 2018 and April 2021 at monthly temporal and 10 m spatial resolution. The basic principle behind this map is to compute monthly composites of the disturbance index (DI, Healey et al. 2005), a spectral index sensitive to forest disturbance, from all available Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 data with less than 80 % cloud cover. These monthly composites are then compared to a median composite of the DI for 2017, which serves as a reference. After applying a threshold to the difference image, the time series of detected losses is checked for consistency. Only losses recorded continuously in all observations of a pixel until the end of the time series are considered. The dataset does not differentiate between the drivers of the losses. It depicts areas of natural disturbances (windthrow, fire, droughts, insect infestation) as well as sanitation and salvage logging, and regular forest harvest. The full description of the method and results can be found in Thonfeld et al. (2022).

The PolarLakes dataset provides bi-weekly observations of supraglacial lakes on Antarctic ice shelves, utilizing imagery from Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-1 to address time series gaps caused by frequent cloud cover. These observations detect the extents of supraglacial lakes with a U-Net model for every two weeks from November to March, with each sensor operating independently before the data is merged. The resulting bi-weekly product reflects the maximum lake extents for the first and second halves of each month. When combined for an entire season, the dataset consolidates all bi-weekly records over these five months, allowing for analysis of the maximum lake extent per season and the frequency of lake formation, which can occur up to ten times (5 months á two weeks). The year indicated in the dataset corresponds to January of the melt season, as this month typically experiences the highest melt rates (e.g., 2023 refers to the season from November 2022 to March 2023). The aggregation of all annual datasets creates a recurrence layer that illustrates the frequency of lake presence throughout the entire observation period, which spans from 2014 to 2024, depending on satellite data availability for each ice shelf. The PolarLakes dataset provides valuable insights into the dynamics of supraglacial lakes and serves as a crucial resource for hydrological and climate modeling.

SWIM Water Extent is a global surface water product at 10 m pixel spacing based on Sentinel-1/2 data. The collection contains binary layers indicating open surface water for each Sentinel-1/2 scene. Clouds and cloud shadows are removed using ukis-csmask (see: https://github.com/dlr-eoc/ukis-csmask ) and are represented as NoData. The water extent extraction is based on convolutional neural networks (CNN). For further information, please see the following publications: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2019.05.022 and https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11192330