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What is the Land Cover Map of Catalonia?

The Land Cover Map of Catalonia (MCSC) is a high resolution thematic cartography of the main types of land cover of the country (forests, crops, urban areas, etc.). The MCSC is carried out in the Centre de Recerca Ecològica i Aplicacions Forestals (CREAF), with the funding of the Generalitat de Catalunya.

El MCSC is part of the Internet available Cartography of the Generalitat de Catalunya and is, therefore, free to use.

The MCSC is presented in digital format. The different areas are delimited by photointerpretation and digitalization on computer screen, using the MiraMon GIS.

The Land Cover Map of Catalonia: Why?

In recent decades, changes in land covers and soil uses have sped up. These changes produces impacts on the environment and the landscape.

Every territorial management or planning that tries to avoid or resolve these problems, necessarily requires the cartography, the snapshot, but also the evolution of land uses and land covers, and changes in landscape structure.

The MCSC is a basic cartography of the land covers that, which currently has four editions. Thanks to the different editions of the MCSC, will be possible to know, among other things, if the forestry area increases or decreases, or if the urban pressure affects non-suitable territories for this use.

 

What is the Land Cover Map of Catalonia for?

 

What is the legend of the Land Cover Map?

The MCSC is a digital product that covers the main types of land covers, with a hierarchical legend of 2 levels and 1 sublevel for the first edition, 3 levels and 1 sublevel for the second edition, and 5 levels and 1 sublevel for the third and fourth edition. In order to obtain such a legend, a part of the categories included in the upper levels are subdivisions of categories of the lower levels. It can be consulted the full table in the document: Table from level 1 to 5.

• The level 5 corresponds to 241 categories, and is exclusive to the third and fourth MCSC edition. The relation of categories and their definitions can be consulted in the document: Description of the categories of MCSC (Level 5)


• The level 4 corresponds to 120 categories and is a level that works as a connection between the MCSC and the product SIOSE (Sistema de Ocupación del Suelo de España). The first and second editions of SIOSE in Catalonia were obtained by generalizing the MCSC-3 and MCSC-4, respectively, on the basis of this level of the legend. 

• The Level 3 corresponds to 61 categories, is the level of  maximum detail of the second edition. While presenting more categories, essentially corresponds to level 3 of the legend of the land cover map CORINE  (European Environment Agency) , althouhg it has a 50 times higher resolution.

• The level 2 corresponds to 24 categories. This is the level of maximum detail of the first edition, Although, at the time of making this edition the number of categories was 21. This is the most detailed level in which we can compare the four map editions.

• The level 1 presents 4 categories, which are groups of categories from level 2, and corresponds to the main types of land covers. This level presents a more  detailed thematic sublevel, which is called 1F in the database of the MCSC, it has 9 categories, 6 of them are subdivisions of the forestry areas from level 1; this sublevel allows the comparison of surfaces with the cover land values such as they are content in the volume of Ecological and Forest Inventory of Catalonia.
  

Interpretation of the legend of the different editions

• InterpretacioLlegendaMCSC_ANGLES.pdf 

• For the MCSC-3v1: LlegendaMCSC_SIOSE_ANGLES.pdf

• For the MCSC-3v2 and MCSC-4: LlegendaMCSC4_SIOSE2_ANGLES.pdf  

What are the characteristics of the MCSC?

The Table 1, shows the scale and resolution of the orthophotos and the working scale used in the different editions of the MCSC. It also indicates the availability of  orthophotos in infrared colour, a very useful material for identifying different types of forests and crops.

The table 2, shows the surface and the minimum width of capture, as well as, the number of categories and levels of the legend for each of the editions of the MCSC.
 

The cartographic basis obtained through this process (boundary lines and identification labels for the covers, figure 1), is devided in sheets that follows the cartographic sections 1:25 000.

Figure 1. Photointerpretation on the ortophoto. Section of the sheet  333-2-2, Santa Coloma de Farners.

Afterwards, is converted to a format of topológically structured vectors  (polygons) (figure 2), thus:

Figure 2. Photointerpretation result. Section of the sheet 333-2-2, Santa Coloma de Farners.

This map also is converted to a raster format  (image where the spatial representation is made by a space division in a grid of squares, called cells or pixels), with a planimetric resolution of 2 m per pixel.  Despite its high detail, the raster image is converted to a compressed version, obtaining smaller files and more agile queries. The raster images also allow interactive queries by attribute and location and calculate  the area of one or more land covers. In addition to being a very handy format in GIS analysis.

Among the operations that are possible to do on the MCSC basis we mention the thematic reclassification in order to obtain more general categories, distance calculation between graphic objects, cross-classification between layers, etc.The selected items in a query on any of these digital formats can be exported to another file, obtaining a new geographical database.

The MCSC is used by several public government institutions, not only in its original format , but as a highly accurate planimetric basis on which other applications or studies are carried out (fuel models and flammability maps, vegetation maps, etc.)

The MCSC has improved technical characteristics over the different editions, in proportion to the quality of the images of the different flights, so that the information in each new edition is more complete, accurate and reliable.

• More detail and higher planimetric resolution: Thanks to the 1:5000 orthophotos, with a pixel of 0.5 m (Figure 3), and the 1:2500 orthophotos with a pixel of 0.25 m.
  

Figure 3. Left, orthoimage 1:25 000. Right, detail of the left image on a orthoimage 1:5000.

• Expansion of the legend: The legend becomes hierarchical, with different levels depending on the map edition. However, the comparability of the maps is maintained. For more details see What is the legend of the Land Cover Map?.
  

• New associated databases: The vectorial format is associated to several databases with the basic statistical information and other referred to the landscape structure. The statistical databases contain the land covers and the sum of areas referred to the three levels and the sublevel of the MCSC legend, for the sheet 1:25.000 in the photointerpretation framework, or for the geographical area if the map referes to a particular territory of Catalonia. They also presents some fields that serve as a table or colour palette and allow the sheet visualization referred to the defined palette for each level of the legend. Moreover, the represented categories in the legend will be the only ones that are present in the sheet, and not the ones that are referred to the whole cartographic serie. Anyway, there are other databases that content information referred to the landscape structure,  by means of descriptive indexes. So, the description in a concise way, of the landscape structure is expected for both at land cover level and at global level, with the sheet framework or with the geographical region.
  

Land cover areas in Catalonia

The volumes of the Ecological and Forest Inventory of Catalonia include the land cover areas of the first MCSC edition for each forest region in which the catalan territory is devided, at level municipal, county and  Interest Natural Areas, as well as the land cover distribution in function of the altitude, the slope, and the orientation.

Main Bibliography on the methodology of the MCSC

IBÀÑEZ, J.J.; BURRIEL, J.A.; & PONS, X. (2002). El mapa de cobertes del sòl de Catalunya: una eina per al coneixement, la planificació i la gestió del territori. Perspectivas Territorials. 3: 10-25. Departament de Política Territorial i Obres Públiques, Generalitat de Catalunya. Barcelona.

BURRIEL, J.A.; IBÀÑEZ, J.J.; & PONS, X. (2005). Segunda edición del mapa de cubiertas del suelo de Cataluña: Herramienta para la gestión sostenible del territorio. Cuadernos de la Sociedad Española de Ciencias Forestales 19: 35-39.

IBÀÑEZ, J.J. & BURRIEL, J.A. (2010): Mapa de cubiertas del suelo de Cataluña: características de la tercera edición y relación con SIOSE. En: Ojeda, J., Pita, M.F. y Vallejo, I. (Eds.), Tecnologías de la Información Geográfica: La Información Geográfica al servicio de los ciudadanos. Secretariado de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Sevilla. Sevilla. Pp. 179-198. ISBN: 978-84-472-1294-1

Links to other combinable carthografy

The Land Cover Map sheets can be combined with other geographical information in digital format in order to complete the analysis. Below are some links to other sources of cartography: 

Formats of the Land Cover Map

The Land Cover Map sheets are only served on digital support. The available formats are:

If you are interested on the sheets of a bigger particular geographic area that is not offered in the MCSC website (provinces, natural parks,...) please contact: joan.pino@uab.cat

	Download MCSC data:
	MCSC first edition (basis images of 1993):			MCSC third edition, version 1 (basis images of 2005-2007):
	Vectors (polygons)			Vectors (polygons)
	Rasters (images)			Rasters (images)
				By administrative boundaries (polygons)
	MCSC second edition (basis images of 2000-2003):			By administrative boundaries (rasters)
	Vectors (polygons)
	Rasters (images)			MCSC third edition, versión 2 (basis images of 2005-2007):
	By administrative boundaries (polygons)			Vectors (polygons)
	By administrative boundaries (rasters)			Rasters (images)
				MCSC fourth edition (basis images of 2009):
				Vectors (polygons)
				Rasters (images)
				Go to SIBosC web