The grid is based on proposal at the 1st European Workshop on Reference Grids in 2003 and later INSPIRE geographical grid systems. The sample grid available here is part of a set of three polygon grids in 1, 10 and 100 kilometres. The grids cover at least country borders and, where applicable, marine Exclusive Economic Zones v7.0, http://www.marineregions.org. Note that the extent of the grid into the marine area does not reflect the extent of the territorial waters.

The Urban Atlas is providing pan-European comparable land use and land cover data for Large Urban Zones with more than 100.000 inhabitants as defined by the Urban Audit. Urban Atlas' mission is to provide high-resolution hotspot mapping of changes in urban spaces and indicators for users such as city governments, the European Environment Agency (EEA) and European Commission departments.

The Common Database on Designated Areas (CDDA) is more commonly known as Nationally designated areas. The inventory began in 1995 under the CORINE programme of the European Commission. It is now one of the agreed Eionet priority data flows maintained by EEA with support from the European Topic Centre on Biological Diversity. It is a result of an annual data flow through Eionet countries. The EEA publishes the data set and makes it available to the World Database of Protected Areas (WDPA). The CDDA data can also be queried online in the European Nature Information System (EUNIS). Geographical coverage of GIS vector boundary data: Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Great Britain, Greece, Ireland, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Kosovo under UNSC Resolution 1244/99, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, the North Macedonia, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. EEA does not have permission to distribute some or all sites reported by Austria, Estonia, Hungary, Ireland, Kosovo under UNSC Resolution 1244/99, Malta, the Netherlands, Romania, Slovenia and Turkey. Copyright is to be mentioned for Estonia: "Estonian Environmental Register 18.02.2013. On-line resource linkage: www.keskkonnainfo.ee"; and for Finland: "©Finnish Environment Institute, 2012".

The Common Database on Designated Areas (CDDA) is more commonly known as Nationally designated areas. The inventory began in 1995 under the CORINE programme of the European Commission. It is now one of the agreed Eionet priority data flows maintained by EEA with support from the European Topic Centre on Biological Diversity. It is a result of an annual data flow through Eionet countries. The EEA publishes the data set and makes it available to the World Database of Protected Areas (WDPA). The CDDA data can also be queried online in the European Nature Information System (EUNIS). Geographical coverage of GIS vector boundary data: Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Great Britain, Greece, Ireland, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Kosovo under UNSC Resolution 1244/99, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, the North Macedonia, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. EEA does not have permission to distribute some or all sites reported by Austria, Estonia, Hungary, Ireland, Kosovo under UNSC Resolution 1244/99, Malta, the Netherlands, Romania, Slovenia and Turkey. Copyright is to be mentioned for Estonia: "Estonian Environmental Register 18.02.2013. On-line resource linkage: www.keskkonnainfo.ee"; and for Finland: "©Finnish Environment Institute, 2012".

The new urban sprawl metric, named "Weighted Urban Proliferation“ (WUP) is based on the following definition of urban sprawl: the more area is built over in a given landscape (amount of built-up area) and the more dispersed this built-up area is in the landscape (spatial configuration), and the higher the uptake of built-up area per inhabitant or job (lower utilisation intensity in the built-up area), the higher the degree of urban sprawl. Weighted Urban Proliferation (WUP) metric has three components: the percentage of built-up areas (PBA), the dispersion of the built-up areas (DIS), and land uptake per person (LUP). Besides WUP and its components, the other indicator was calculated: Utilisation Density (UD). UD measures the number of people living and working per km2 of built-up area.

The new urban sprawl metric, named "Weighted Urban Proliferation“ (WUP) is based on the following definition of urban sprawl: the more area is built over in a given landscape (amount of built-up area) and the more dispersed this built-up area is in the landscape (spatial configuration), and the higher the uptake of built-up area per inhabitant or job (lower utilisation intensity in the built-up area), the higher the degree of urban sprawl. Weighted Urban Proliferation (WUP) metric has three components: the percentage of built-up areas (PBA), the dispersion of the built-up areas (DIS), and land uptake per person (LUP).

Corine Land Cover Change 1990-2000 (CHA9000) is one of the Corine Land Cover (CLC) datasets produced within the frame the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service referring to changes in land cover / land use status between the years 1990 and 2000. CHA is derived from satellite imagery by direct mapping of changes taken place between two consecutive inventories, based on image-to-image comparison. CLC service has a long-time heritage (formerly known as "CORINE Land Cover Programme"), coordinated by the European Environment Agency (EEA). It provides consistent and thematically detailed information on land cover and land cover changes across Europe. CLC datasets are based on the classification of satellite images produced by the national teams of the participating countries - the EEA members and cooperating countries (EEA39). National CLC inventories are then further integrated into a seamless land cover map of Europe. The resulting European database relies on standard methodology and nomenclature with following base parameters: 44 classes in the hierarchical 3-level CLC nomenclature; minimum mapping unit (MMU) for status layers is 25 hectares; minimum width of linear elements is 100 metres. Change layers have higher resolution, i.e. minimum mapping unit (MMU) is 5 hectares for Land Cover Changes (CHA), and the minimum width of linear elements is 100 metres. The CLC service delivers important data sets supporting the implementation of key priority areas of the Environment Action Programmes of the European Union as e.g. protecting ecosystems, halting the loss of biological diversity, tracking the impacts of climate change, monitoring urban land take, assessing developments in agriculture or dealing with water resources directives. CLC belongs to the Pan-European component of the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (https://land.copernicus.eu/), part of the European Copernicus Programme coordinated by the European Environment Agency, providing environmental information from a combination of air- and space-based observation systems and in-situ monitoring. Additional information about CLC product description including mapping guides can be found at https://land.copernicus.eu/user-corner/technical-library/. CLC class descriptions can be found at https://land.copernicus.eu/user-corner/technical-library/corine-land-cover-nomenclature-guidelines/html/.

CORINE Land Cover (CLC) was specified to standardize data collection on land in Europe to support environmental policy development. The reference year of first CLC inventory was 1990 (CLC1990), and the first update created in 2000. Later the update cycle has become 6 years. The number of participating countries has increased over time − currently includes 33 European Environment Agency (EEA) member countries and six cooperating countries (EEA39) with a total area of over 5.8 Mkm2. Ortho-corrected high spatial resolution satellite images provide the geometrical and thematic basis for mapping. In-situ data (topographic maps, ortho-photos and ground survey data) are essential ancillary information. The project is coordinated by the EEA in the frame of the EU Copernicus programme and implemented by national teams under the management and quality control (QC) of the EEA. The basic technical parameters of CLC (i.e. 44 classes in nomenclature, 25 hectares minimum mapping unit (MMU) and 100 meters minimum mapping width) have not changed since the beginning, therefore the results of the different inventories are comparable. The layer of CORINE Land Cover Changes (CLCC) is produced since the second CLC inventory (CLC2000). CLCC is derived from satellite imagery by direct mapping of changes taken place between two consecutive inventories, based on image-to-image comparison. Change mapping applies a 5 ha MMU to pick up more details in CLCC layer than in CLC status layer. Integration of national CLC and CLCC data includes some harmonization along national borders. Two European validation studies have shown that the achieved thematic accuracy is above the specified minimum (85 %). Primary CLC and CLCC data are in vector format with polygon topology. Derived products in raster format are also available. The seamless European CLC and CLCC time series data (CLC1990, CLC2000, CLC2006, CLC2012 and related CLCC data) are distributed in the standard European Coordinate Reference System defined by the European Terrestrial Reference System 1989 (ETRS89) datum and Lambert Azimuthal Equal Area (LAEA) projection (EPSG: 3035). Results of the CLC inventories can be downloaded from Copernicus Land site free of charge for all users. CLC data can contribute to a wide range of studies with European coverage, e.g.: ecosystem mapping, modelling the impacts of climate change, landscape fragmentation by roads, abandonment of farm land and major structural changes in agriculture, urban sprawl, water management.

The Marine Reporting Units (MRUs) are used within the reporting obligations of the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) in order to link the implementation of the different articles to specific marine areas. The MRUs can be of varying sizes, according to the appropriate scale for the different reports (e.g. region, sub-region, regional or sub-regional subdivision, Member State marine waters, WFD coastal waters, etc.), as indicated in the Good Environmental Status 2017 Decision. The present data set is the second public version released of the MRUs used during the MSFD 2018 reporting exercise on the update of Articles 8, 9 and 10. Only the MRUs of those countries that have gone through the reporting exercise by June 2020 have been included in this data set. Apart from the countries included already in version 1 of the dataset (SE, FI, EE, LV, PL, DE, DK, NL, BE, FR, ES, HR and RO), this version also includes seven more countries, namely MT, LT, IT, SI, CY, PT and IE. The data set is distributed in SHP and in INSPIRE-compliant GML format, made available also through an INSPIRE compliant ATOM service.

Metropolitan regions 2021 are NUTS 3 regions or a combination of NUTS 3 regions which represent all agglomerations of at least 250 000 inhabitants. Version 2021 is based on NUTS 2021, based on the Commission Delegated Regulation 2019/1755. These agglomerations were identified using the Urban Audit's Functional Urban Area (FUA). Each agglomeration is represented by at least one NUTS 3 region. If in an adjacent NUTS 3 region more than 50% of the population also lives within this agglomeration, it is included in the metro. For more information see: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/metropolitan-regions/background https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Territorial_typologies_manual_-_metropolitan_regions IMPORTANT NOTE: This metadata is adapted from the corresponding Eurostat GISCO metadata and it is intended only for internal EEA use.