data api · Europe

JRC Global Forest Cover 2020

This publication is a byte-for-byte mirror of the JRC (European Commission Joint Research Centre) global map of forest cover 2020, version 4. It is one global Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF that categorizes land into forest or non-forest at 10 meter resolution. Version 3 stays available under v3/, but the JRC has deprecated it.

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What's in it

Data offered docs-verified: forest / non-forest land cover classification (binary: 1 = forest, 0 = non-forest) · single-year 2020 forest cover map · 10 m forest cover raster (global)
Coverage docs-verified: Global, longitude -180 to 180, latitude -60 to 80 · 2020
Resolution docs-verified: ~10 m at the equator (1/12000°)
Formats docs-verified: GeoTIFF (Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF, COG)
Access docs-verified: Free and open; public, anonymous HTTPS/S3 access via data.source.coop (no sign-in). Licence CC-BY-4.0 (attribution requested).

Useful for

Use cases llm-inferred: Forest/non-forest baseline for overseas site appraisals, alongside habitat or ecological baselines · Clip the 10 m forest mask to a project boundary to quantify the forest share against a 2020 reference · Land-cover context for environmental impact assessments in forested catchments
Audience llm-inferred: ecologists · GIS analysts · environmental consultants · hydrologists

Limitations

Constraints docs-verified: Single 2020 snapshot only; no other years in this product · v3 is deprecated by the JRC and will not be updated; use v4 for new work · No public icechunk store is available for this product · Reads through rioxarray need mask_and_scale=False, otherwise 0 decodes to NaN · No NoData is declared, so 0 (non-forest) is real data and must not be masked out by default · Binary forest/non-forest only; no forest type, canopy density or change information · Extent stops at latitude -60 to 80, so polar and far-southern sites are outside coverage · Large single file (V4 is 37.7 GiB); use windowed or cloud-optimised reads rather than full downloads

Licence: see product README
Authentication: Public; anonymous HTTPS/S3 access via data.source.coop
GitHub stars: Unknown
Last commit: Unknown
Last successful page check: 14/10/2026
Page health: page reachable
Package: Not recorded
Verification: Not independently verified

Provenance & evidence

Verified via Source Cooperative API /api/v1/products/epoch (public product, updated 2026-10-09).

Metadata observed 14/10/2026 · research sweep: manual-2026-10-15 (source.coop)