Linking pan-European land cover change to pressures on biodiversity - Biopress final report 1st January 2003 - 31st December 2005, sections 1 to 4

BIOPRESS – Linking pan-European land cover change to pressures on biodiversity – is a 3 year EC-FPV project funded in the framework of the GMES ‘Global Monitoring for Environment and Security’ initiative (http://gmes.fdc.fr/what_is/home.html). It was the only GMES project under the priority theme "Land cover change in Europe”. BIOPRESS’s main goal was to provide the EU-user community with quantitative information on how changes in land cover and land use has affected the environment and biodiversity in Europe. The project aimed at producing consistent and coherent sets of historical (1950 – 1990 – 2000) land cover change information in and around circa 75 Natura2000 sites located from the boreal to the Mediterranean, and from the Atlantic to the continental regions of Europe. These land cover change statistics would be converted into quantitative measures of pressures on biodiversity through the integration of socio-economic indicators. The impact of the land cover changes on biodiversity would also be assessed. The change statistics were produced by means of two parallel activities, the backdating of CORINE land cover 1990 of circa 75 windows (30km x30km) with aerial photography of the 1950’ies and, the interpretation of aerial photography from 1950, 1990 and 2000 for circa 50 transects (2km x 15km). The windows were interpreted to identify the CORINE level 3 land cover and use classes to a minimum mapping unit of 25 ha. The transects, at the other hand, were interpreted to a minimum mapping unit of 0.5 ha. Scientific achievements: Data access The BIOPRESS team established an operational online access point for metadata and data of relevant European datasets. The European data policy appears to be the major obstacle for easy access to European datasets even in case of projects that are financed by the European Commission. The INSPIRE initiative as well as the GMES framework could benefit from the experiences made in the BIOPRESS project in order to streamline acces