Google Earth Engine
Freemium
Planetary-scale geospatial analysis in the cloud — the data catalogue and compute behind modern water remote sensing.
ESA CCI Land Cover
ActiveA consistent annual global land cover record at 300m from 1992 — long enough to trend land-use change against.
by European Space Agency (CCI)
- Pricing
- Free
- License
- Free, no registration required
- Commercial use
- Permitted
- Ecosystem
- Any GIS, Python
- Platform
- Windows, macOS, Linux
About ESA CCI Land Cover
ESA CCI Land Cover provides an annual global land cover map at 300m resolution from 1992 to 2015 (continued operationally through the Copernicus Climate Change Service since), built to a consistent methodology specifically so successive years are comparable — a property higher-resolution but sporadically-released products like WorldCover don't offer.
Where WorldCover and Dynamic World win on spatial detail and currency, CCI Land Cover wins on record length: it is the product to reach for when the question is "how has land use in this basin trended over 30 years," not "what is on the ground this month."
Where it fits in the workflow
TerrainCatchmentRainfallRunoffRoutingHydraulicsMappingReporting
Alternatives to ESA CCI Land Cover
Ranked by the topics, categories and workflow stages they share with ESA CCI Land Cover.
Dynamic World
Free
Near-real-time 10m land cover from Google/WRI, updated every Sentinel-2 pass — land cover that keeps up.
ESA WorldCover
Free
Global 10m land cover from Sentinel-1/2 — the highest-resolution free global land cover map available.
JRC Global Surface Water
Gov-Public
Pixel-level surface water history since 1984, built from the entire Landsat archive — where water has been, and when.
ERA5 / ERA5-Land
Free
ECMWF's hourly global reanalysis — the default gap-free climate forcing record for ungauged catchments worldwide.
The longest satellite soil moisture record available — merged active+passive retrievals back to 1978, free, no login.