The European inventory of Nationally designated areas holds information about designated areas and their designation types, which directly or indirectly create protected areas. The Nationally designated areas is the official source of protected area information from the 38 European member countries to the World Database of Protected Areas (WDPA). The Nationally designated areas data can be queried online in the European Nature Information System (EUNIS). Two versions of the public dataset are provided. The full dataset includes the entire geographical coverage including nationally designated areas in overseas entities. The European dataset excludes the overseas entities. The datasets are accompanied by tabular data which 1) includes information on the nationally designated sites and designated boundaries for public dissemination; and 2) contains information about designation types and the national and international legislative instruments, which directly or indirectly create protected designated areas in Europe.
The effective mesh density (seff) is a measure of the degree to which movement between different parts of the landscape is interrupted by a Fragmentation Geometry (FG). FGs are defined as the presence of impervious surfaces and traffic infrastructure, including medium sized roads. The more FGs fragment the landscape, the higher the effective mesh density hence the higher the fragmentation.
CORINE Land Cover is a pan-European land cover inventory with 44 classes. Initiated in 1985 (the 1990 reference year) the inventory is available for the 1990, 2000, 2006, 2012 and 2018 reference years including change layers 1990-2000, 2006-2012 and 2012-2018. CORINE Land Cover is part of the European Union’s Copernicus Land Monitoring Service.
The Urban Sprawl datasets shows the physically expanding urban areas - the spatial arrangement of built-up areas and their utilization. The European Environment Agency (EEA) has described sprawl as the physical pattern of low-density expansion of large urban areas, under market conditions, mainly into the surrounding agricultural areas. Sprawl is the leading edge of urban growth and implies little planning control of land subdivision urban sprawl metrics .
These datasets represents a measure of intensification (nutrient, mangement pressure and pressure indicator) trend of agroecosystems. The nutrient input is a specific measure related to the intensification processes in the management of cropland and grassland ecosystems. The management pressure on cropland and grassland was calculated by combining information of nitrogen input from the Farm Structure Survey (FSS), the Corine Land Use/Land Cover dataset and other environmental characteristics such as topographic conditions, soil and climate conditions. The trend indicator is the share of cropland or grassland areas affected by internal Land Cover flows between CORINE changes, presented at NUTS3 level.