PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE SENSING
February 2017
79
BOOK
REVIEW
This sturdy book contains the fundamental information
concerning the projects and products of the CoORdination of
INformation on the Environnment (CORINE) Land Cover (CLC).
CORINE has been and continues to be an ambitious program
to map land cover and land use for the entirety of Europe in a
consistent manner. The CORINE data serve as a fundamental
source of information for a variety of studies in Europe. Thus it is
extremely helpful to have in one book descriptions of the various
aspects of CORINE that a user would want to know first.
The four editors are supremely qualified. Jan Feranec was a
member of the central CORINE Land Cover Projects Technical
Team from 2001 to 2009. Tomas Soukup is a member of
the central CORINE team and has more than 20 years of
professional experience. Gerard Hazeu has been responsible
for CORINE updates in The Netherlands and is responsible
for the Dutch national land cover database. Gabriel Jaffrain
has been an expert for the CORINE project since 1994 and is
involved in land & environment projects in 50 countries. These
four editors are co-authors for 21 of the 29 chapters. There are
43 contributing authors.
The book is well organized. Section I has two chapters that
give Overview and History. Section II has seven chapters that
describe Methodology, including details of the satellite data,
accuracy assessment, and dissemination policy. I learned some
crucial information. For example, the maps of change have
been checked for commission of change errors, by examining
the places where the maps from two time points differ, to see
whether themaps are correct at those places. However, themaps
of change have not been checked for omission of change errors,
which would be at places where the maps from the two time
points show the same category but at least one of the maps is
wrong. This illustrates how the book states helpful information
concerning what is known and what is not known concerning
the data. Section III has seven chapters that summarize the
data at 1990, 2000, 2006, and 2012, including the changes for
each of the three time intervals. The book summarizes the
data in an appropriate straightforward manner, expressed
in tables and figures, mostly by country. The tables give
the change per year, so it is possible to compare across time
intervals. Section IV contains nine chapters concerning case
studies. The chapters give several methods to assess change
across the entirety of Europe. One chapter examines landscape
fragmentation, which makes use of the spatial information
in GIS data much more so than tables of category totals by
country. There are several examples of how to use the CORINE
data for applied research, including ecosystem assessment and
scenario modeling. Section V gives insight into the future of the
CORINE project and offers a helpful summary. The conclusion
contains the following sentence concerning the book’s aim: “If
the monograph succeeds in convincing users about the assets
of the European CLC program and information generated to
contribute to though knowledge of the European landscape
and monitoring of its dynamics then it achieved its aim”. I
have read that sentence several times and I still do not quite
follow that sentence. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority
of the book is well-written as it clearly describes the CORINE
project in detail and illustrates how to use the CORINE data
EUROPEAN LANDSCAPE DYNAMICS:
CORINE LAND COVER DATA
Jan Feranec, Tomas Soukup, Gerard Hazeu, and
Gabriel Jaffrain Editors
CRC Press: Boca Raton FL. 2016. ISBN -13: 978-1-4822-4466-3.
Reviewed by:
Robert Gilmore Pontius Jr, Professor
and Associate Director, Graduate School of Geography,
Clark University, Worcester MA, USA.
Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing
Vol. 83, No. 2, February 2017, pp. 79.
0099-1112/17/79
© 2017 American Society for Photogrammetry
and Remote Sensing
doi: 10.14358/PERS.83.2.79
intelligently. There is a 7-page index in the back, which allows
readers to find information efficiently. The electronic version of
the book would allow you to find information even more quickly.
The most critical things I can write are that several of
the maps lack scale bars, which is a scourge throughout the
profession. But overall, the cartography is appropriate and
straight forward. Perhaps a future book could contain is
online links to animated visualizations of the land changes
through time. The summaries of change in Section III give
a bar graph of the total amount of change by country, but
miss an opportunity to give a more informative visualization.
Specifically, it would have been more helpful if each bar of each
country’s overall change consisted of two stacked segments to
indicate quantity change and allocation change.
Overall, the authors have done an outstanding job of putting
the most important information of the CORINE land data in
one volume. If you use the CORINE data regularly, then you
need this book at your fingertips.
