Exploring the limitations of CORINE Land Cover for monitoring urban land-use dynamics in metropolitan areas

One of the sources of data most utilized in Europe by planners, policy makers and researchers is CORINE Land Cover (CLC) because of its wide territorial coverage. However, the users of this spatial database do not have information on its quality for analysing urban land and its evolution. This study analyses the limitations of CLC for monitoring urban land use dynamics, using Madrid Land Use as a mapping reference. This is a local geographical database with higher resolution for the Madrid region that coincides with CLC at the years of reference (2000, 2006). The results show that with respect to the total urban land area in 2000 and 2006 and the area converted to urban land between 2000 and 2006, CLC is relatively reliable. However, the confusion matrices show very high error rates, especially in dynamic analyses (changes between 2000 and 2006) and when there is differentiation between different types of land use. Researchers, planners and decision-makers should therefore exercise considerable caution when using this source for analysing urban land use and its dynamics for local approaches.