National Land Cover Map of Ireland (NLC 2018)

The National Land Cover Map of Ireland 2018 (NLC 2018) is a high-resolution GIS dataset that maps what physically covers the land surface of the Republic of Ireland, from hedgerows and peatlands to buildings. It was produced by the Surveying function of Tailte Éireann (formerly Ordnance Survey Ireland) in partnership with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and released on 21 March 2023. Before it, national assessments relied on CORINE, mapped at 25 hectares, and several agencies maintained their own partial land cover maps.

The map was built with earth observation and machine learning, analysing Tailte Éireann aerial imagery, existing national datasets and Sentinel-2 satellite imagery from the Copernicus programme, with rule-based classification. It describes over 10 million landscape features in 36 Level 2 classes (grouped into 8 Level 1 classes) designed for Irish landscapes, at a minimum mapping unit of 0.1 hectares, about 250 times more detailed than CORINE. An independent validation of more than 20,000 samples, carried out with external stakeholders and the Central Statistics Office, gave a thematic accuracy of 88.7% at Level 1 and 78.5% at Level 2, and a geometric accuracy of 87.2%.

The data reflects 2018 conditions; Tailte Éireann plans updated editions from new orthophotography. It supports environmental assessment for water, climate, air, noise and biodiversity, and land management decisions. Government departments access it through the National Mapping Agreement; it is also open data under CC BY 4.0, as downloads (including file geodatabase), an ArcGIS feature service and an online viewer.