Harmonised LUCAS in-situ land cover and use database for field surveys from 2006 to 2018 in the European Union

Accurately characterizing land surface changes with Earth Observation requires geo-localized ground truth. In the European Union (EU), a tri-annual surveyed sample of land cover and land use has been collected since 2006 under the Land Use/Cover Area frame Survey (LUCAS). A total of 1,351,293 observations at 651,780 unique locations for 117 variables along with 5.4 million photos were collected during five LUCAS surveys. Until now, these data have never been harmonised into one database, limiting full exploitation of the information. This paper describes the LUCAS point sampling/surveying methodology, including collection of standard variables such as land cover, environmental parameters, and full resolution…