The vector dataset presents the percentage of green space in densely built-up areas for a series of individual European cities (included in Urban Audit) for the year 2012. The presence and proportion of green space in densely built-up urban areas is an important aspect of adaptation to climate change. Green space regulates the microclimate of the city, reducing the temperatures. It also reduces the risk of flooding related to heavy precipitation, as vegetation and permeable surfaces retain and infiltrate rainwater, reducing the amount that comes into the drainage system. Data on green space was obtained from Copernicus Urban Atlas 2012, extracting the Urban Atlas classes treated as green space. The Urban Morphological Area (UMZ) dataset for 2012 and the Eurostat Urban Audit dataset (polygon, 2011-2014) were been used to calculate the total area within the core city. The values were then allocated to the city centroids from the same Eurostat Urban Audit dataset.

The European Settlement Map 2015 (ESM_2015) is a spatial raster dataset that is mapping human settlements in Europe (EEA39) based on Copernicus Very High Resolution optical coverage for reference year 2015 (VHR_IMAGE_2015). It is produced with the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) technology of the Joint Research Centre (JRC) in collaboration with the Directorate General of Regional and Urban Policy. It follows-up on the previous ESM2012_R2016 and ESM2012_R2017 derived from 2.5 m resolution SPOT-5/6 images acquired in the context of the pan-European GMES/Copernicus (Core_003) dataset for the reference year 2012. This metadata refers to the level 3 layer of ESM_2015. The level 3 layer delivers the following city-based layers: open spaces, a distance layer that contains the Euclidean distances from built-up pixels to open spaces and green in open spaces. The pixel size for level 3 layer is 10 m and the extent of each city is defined by the urban centres database. The level 3 layer is calculated for 888 cities. Open spaces are binary layers, while the distances to open spaces are continuous layers (float data type). The distance is expressed in number of pixels. To derive the distance in meters, it has to be multiplied by 10 corresponding to the pixel size in meters. The NDVI layer is provided with a full EEA-39 coverage tiled into 100 x 100 km tiles (tile index available in the following shapefile : index_NDVI.shp). The other layers are provided by urban city centers. ESM_2015 offers new opportunities in Earth observation related research by allowing to study urbanisation and related features across Europe in urban and rural areas, from continental to country perspective, from regional to local, until single blocks. IMPORTANT NOTE: This metadata refers to the Level 3 classification, which includes scientific datasets available upon request. The metadata has been prepared by the EEA on a third party dataset and is to be used for internal purposes. The following datasets are available through this metadata (see README file provided with the dataset): ESM_2015 level-3 NDVI ESM_2015 level-3 Open spaces ESM_2015 level-3 Distances in meters from built-up areas to open spaces For more information about the dataset please contact the owner. For general information on ESM and download: https://ghsl.jrc.ec.europa.eu/download.php?ds=ESM.