GlobCover is an ESA initiative which began in 2005 in partnership with JRC, EEA, FAO, UNEP, GOFC-GOLD and IGBP. The aim of the project was to develop a service capable of delivering global composites and land cover maps using as input observations from the 300m MERIS sensor on board the ENVISAT satellite mission. ESA makes available the land cover maps, which cover 2 periods: December 2004 - June 2006 and January - December 2009. For maximum user benefit the thematic legend of GlobCover is compatible with the UN Land Cover Classification System (LCCS). The system is based on an automatic pre-processing and classification chain. Both of the two global land cover maps (2005/2006 and 2009) provided in the framework of GlobCover have been validated by an international group of land cover experts and the validation reports were made available to the user community. Except for the global land cover maps, a set of MERIS by-products were also made freely available through the main data distribution source, ESA Ionia Server.

The CCI-LC team has successfully produced and released its 3-epoch series of global land cover maps at 300m spatial resolution, where each epoch covers a 5-year period (2008-2012, 2003-2007, 1998-2002). These maps were produced using a multi-year and multi-sensor strategy in order to make use of all suitable data and maximize product consistency. The entire 2003-2012 MERIS Full and Reduced Resolution (FR and RR) archive was used as input to generate a 10-year 2003-2012 global land cover map. This 10-year product has then served as a baseline to derive the 2010, 2005 and 2000 maps using back- and up-dating techniques with MERIS and SPOT-Vegetation time series specific to each epoch.