This data set shows the European forest area in 2012 at 100m spatial resolution, covering EEA39 countries. It is based on Copernicus HRL forest products at 20m spatial resolution and complies with the FAO forest definition (i.e. minimum mapping unit of 0.5 ha, minimum coverage of 10% and excluding land that is predominantly under agricultural or urban land use). After the selection of those pixels identified as forest by the HRL forest products and also compliant with FAO criteria, the forest area dataset at 100m was computed as a Boolean product (i.e. forest / non-forest). The value 1 (forest area) correspond to the pixels where forest is the major coverage; otherwise the pixel value is 0 (non-forest area).

This dataset refers to the Richness index of Species and Habitats of Conservation Concern indicator. This indicator has been developed to be used as a sub-indicator for contributing to the identification of the High Nature Value (HNV) Forest Areas as it will be integrated with other sub-indicators of horizontal structure, management and naturalness to generate the final composite indicator. It is composed itself of three sub-indicators: “Forest Non-bird species”, “Forest bird species” and “Forest habitats”. All the three sub-indicators build on distribution data from the reporting of habitat and species conservation status under Article 17 of the Habitats Directive and Article 12 of the Birds directive which describe their distribution at 10km grid resolution. The forest species and the forest habitats proposed to be used for the HNV forest area identification were selected based on expert judgement (ETC/BD) and raster files reporting the count of forest species and habitats were created. At this stage, no weight is applied based on Habitat and Species prioritization, conservation status or endemism. The sub-indicators were then normalized for each European forest type and successively combined not assigning any specific weight to a particular sub-indicator. The values for this indicator, present in this dataset, ranges between 0 and 1. The values close to 1 mean high presence of habitats and species related to forest, whereas the lower richness are closer to 0. It covers the forested areas of the EU 27 (2007) Member States except for Cyprus (data from Croatia will be reported starting from the next update regarding the period 2013-2018).

This data set shows the European forest area in 2015 at 100m spatial resolution, covering EEA39 countries. It is based on Copernicus HRL forest products at 20m spatial resolution and complies with the FAO forest definition (i.e. minimum mapping unit of 0.5 ha, minimum coverage of 10% and excluding land that is predominantly under agricultural or urban land use). After the selection of those pixels identified as forest by the HRL forest products and also compliant with FAO criteria, the forest area dataset at 100m was computed as a Boolean product (i.e. forest / non-forest). The value 1 (forest area) correspond to the pixels where forest is the major coverage; otherwise the pixel value is 0 (non-forest area).