Differences and Incongruences in Land Take Monitoring Techniques

The new European standards and directives on land take raise critical issues concerning the techniques for measuring and monitoring the phenomenon in order to achieve the targets fixed. The directive “No Net Land Take by 2050”, makes it necessary to homogenize both the terminology used to define land take or consumption and the standardization of a computational methodology for its quantification. In order to achieve the goals, set by the EU regarding land take and soil sealing, it is necessary for EU member states to produce comparable data. It is essential to use the same data sources with standardized coding and to share the same meaning of the concept of land take. Therefore, with the aim of highlighting the criticalities and inconsistencies arising from the use of different techniques and datasets for monitoring land take, we will analyze, first, different definitions of land take derived from institutional sources including the European Environment Agency (EEA); then to each definition we will associate the corresponding land cover classes derived from the Copernicus Corine Land Cover (CLC) project. For the quantitative analysis we will use continuous and discontinuous datasets (raster and vectors) whose results will be compared with the data of the annual report on land take of the Superior Institute for environmental protection and research of Italy (ISPRA 2020).