Belgium has participated with its European partners in CORINE, the European Union’s programme to take stock of the state of the environment. This programme sets down a common set of methods for all of the partners to use in conducting the various inventories. One of the dimensions studied is land use or cover. This part is better known as the CORINE Land Cover inventory. The land cover inventory relies heavily on the use of satellite imagery. The result is a continuous (that is, cutting across borders) vector database at the rough scale of 1/100,000. The Belgian data have also been published as maps by the National Geographic Institute (NGI).

In addition to this snapshot of land use and cover, we have integrated the CORINE Land Cover data into a broader study of land use changes in Belgium over several decades. This has been done for two trial regions, namely, a vast area around Brussels (the Murbandy project), and a strip running along the entire Belgian coast. These time studies reveal the possibilities of using heterogeneous data (maps, aerial photos, and multitemporal satellite imagery) to create a homogeneous multitemporal geographic database.