For the provision of land monitoring services within COPERNICUS, a consistent, stable, sufficiently detailed boundary layer is required at EEA, which provides a “land mask” for the area that needs to be monitored. This metadata refers to the National Boundary layer both in vector formats (GDB, SHP) and in raster format (TIFF) at 10, 20 and 100m resolution, of each of the EEA member and cooperating countries as well as the United Kingdom (former EEA39). This is a product derived from the EEA 39 Border Expert product, generalised to a scale of about 1:1 000 000 by applying a buffer of 250m and selecting the outline. Each country boundary has been projected to its respective national system(s), which are specified together with the EEA. The Border Expert product is based on the EU-Hydro Coastline Version 3 from EEA, the EEA coastline for analysis Version 2, the EBM GISCO Hybrid Layer from EEA, the EuroGeographics EuroBoundary Map Version 12, the “Water and Wetness High Resolution Layer 2015” from EEA and the JRC-Global Surface Water Occurrence layer. The production of this Border Product was coordinated by the European Environment Agency in the frame of the EU Copernicus programme.
The Copernicus boundary layers cover the EEA38 member states and United Kingdom including the French DOM (French Guiana GF, Guadeloupe GP, Martinique MQ, Mayotte YT and Reunion RE). The Copernicus Boundary Layer provides both land masks for the countries as well as national boundaries. The datasets are based on a rasterisation of the Boundary Layer vector product. The raster products are available with 250 m buffer in these resolutions: raster 10m, raster 20m and raster 100m. The production of the Border Products was coordinated by the European Environment Agency in the frame of the EU Copernicus programme. The use of the raster 10m, raster 20m and the vector data has to be agreed with EEA.