Where do we find permanent grasslands? Approaches and shortcomings of existing European-scale maps

Summary in the original language of the document

Knowing the area and distribution of permanent grassland (PG) is crucial for agricultural and environmental policy-making, quantifying ecosystem service delivery, or modelling effects of global change. The Copernicus High Resolution Layer Grassland (HRL) and the Ecosystem Types of Europe map (ETE) are the two most detailed European-scale maps of permanent grasslands available today. We compared the regional PG area predicted by the two mapping approaches and found considerable differences between the two, with direction and extent of these differences varying greatly between European regions. We related the ratio between the PG area predicted by ETE and HRL to the dominance of other land use classes in each region. ETE appeared to be more likely to classify heterogeneous agricultural areas as well as sparsely vegetated areas as PG than HRL, while the opposite was true for wetlands and urban green areas. However, these relationships explained only a small proportion of the differences between ETE and HRL. PG areas mapped by either approach were found to be mostly larger, but in some regions smaller, than PG area reported in agricultural statistics. Applications of these datasets need to take these limitations into account.