Land cover map (Egnatia Highway)

Geoville, an international consulting company based in Austria and Luxemburg, was selected by ESA to supply the European Investment Bank with a time series of land cover/habitat maps based on historic and recent satellite imagery from SPOT, showing the state of the landscape before and during the construction works of the Egnatia Highway project in Greece.

This high-resolution land cover map was created to serve as the future baseline. The update was done in a way to guarantee compatibility with existing data and indicators. Compared to the Corine Land Cover-based maps, this map provides a much higher level of spatial detail of the land cover information and therefore allows more precise analysis of changes. The results show that the impact of the road construction is strongest during the construction phase. Once finalised, the fragmentation will decrease again due to the removal of temporary roads.