Ecodatacube.eu: Analysis-ready open environmental data cube for Europe

Abstract

The paper describes production steps and accuracy assessment of an analysis-ready (complete, consistent, correct and current) open environmental data cube (2000–2021+) for continental Europe; at working resolutions from 10 m to 30 m and with quarterly to annual estimates. The data cube is based on processing and harmonizing earth observation (EO) images: Landsat GLAD ARD (2000–2020+), Sentinel-2 images (2017–2021+) and Digital Elevation data. These datasets were created with accessibility, user-friendliness, interoperability and synthesis in mind. This has required systematic spatiotemporal harmonization, efficient compression, and imputation of missing values. To ensure a missing value percentage below 1%, the EO data was first aggregated into four quarterly periods approximating the four seasons common in Europe (winter, spring, summer and autumn), and then split into three percentiles (25th, 50th and 75th). Remaining missing data in the Landsat time-series was imputed with a temporal moving window median (TMWM) approach. The accuracy assessment shows TMWM gap-filling achieves higher performance in Southern Europe, and lower performance in mountainous regions such as the Scandinavian Mountains, the Alps, and the Pyrenees. The intended uses of the EcoDataCube platform include vegetation, soil, land cover and land use mapping projects, environmental monitoring and automated generation of data for statistical offices including Eurostat. Results further show that combining all four datasets produced in this work (DTM, Landsat 30 m, Sentinel-2 30 m and Sentinel-2 10 m) yields the highest land cover classification accuracy, with different datasets improving the results for different land cover classes. The Environmental data cube for Europe is available under CC-BY license as Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs (ca. 12 TB in size) through STAC and the EcoDataCube data portal.