The release of the Copernicus High-Resolution Layers on Vegetated Land Cover Characteristics (HRL-VLCC) in 2025 creates opportunities for the development of indicators to evaluate agricultural and nature-related policies. However, due to the limited availability of ground data for validating some layers and the scientific novelty of the dataset, a consistency analysis is required before the data can be reliably exploited.
This report assesses the temporal and cross-layer consistency of the HRL-VLCC layers on Croplands. The main issue identified is a lack of temporal consistency between consecutive years of the cropping pattern layers, which classify the agricultural year into main season, secondary season, bare soil and fallow land. As each reference year is processed independently, overlaps may occur between successive cropping seasons, as well as between cropping seasons and bare soil or fallow periods. In addition, some days within each reference year remain unclassified and may correspond either to bare soil or to an undetected cropping season, which hampers the reconstruction of complete bare soil periods. The analysis also reveals several cross-layer inconsistencies that require attention, such as discrepancies between fallow land duration and fallow land presence, or between main season phenology and fallow land information. Furthermore, other cross-layer inconsistencies inherent to the processing chain should be more clearly documented in the Product User Manual.
The report describes the causes of each identified inconsistency, quantifies their impacts at the EU scale, proposes correction methods to enable the use of the current version of the data, and discusses solutions for producing a new, issue-free version of the dataset. In the longer term, regular data reprocessing emerges as the only effective solution to address the reported issues while preserving the temporal consistency of the HRL-VLCC.
URRACA Ruben;
CLAVERIE Martin;
IORDANOV Momchil;
MARTINEZ SANCHEZ Laura;
VAN DER VELDE Marijn;
2026-05-05
Publications Office of the European Union
JRC146261
978-92-68-39522-6 (online),
1831-9424 (online),
EUR 40712,
OP KJ-01-26-192-EN-N (online),
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC146261,
10.2760/9842450 (online),
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