EU Grassland Watch

EU Grassland Watch is a free web portal, managed by the European Commission's Directorate-General for Environment, that tracks how grasslands evolve inside Natura 2000 protected sites. Species-rich grasslands continue to be lost even within these sites through farmland intensification, rural abandonment and other land use changes, and tracking their area and condition patch by patch across the EU is otherwise difficult.

The portal covers 3,689 grassland-rich Natura 2000 sites in the 27 EU Member States, almost 25% of the network's land area, from 1994 onwards. Optical imagery from Copernicus Sentinel-2 and the US Landsat satellites (used to fill cloud and snow gaps and to extend the series back to 1994) and Copernicus Sentinel-1 radar are combined into monthly composites, classified, and attached to the reference objects of the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service Natura 2000 product. Outputs are annual land cover / land use maps at four levels of thematic detail, grassland biophysics, phenology and productivity, mowing and ploughing products, and indicators of grassland surface, cover change and class diversity at site, region, country and European level.

Users explore the maps with a time slider, print maps, export indicator charts and tables, and can query an open web API that needs no authentication. The portal was developed as a European Parliament pilot project (COP4N2K). The current version is a prototype that is being replaced by a new operational version co-designed with its users.