Good practice:

National ecosystem map of Hungary

The Ecosystem Map of Hungary was created within the frame of an EU-co-financed project named: "Strategic Assessments supporting the long-term conservation of natural values of community interest as well as the national implementation of the EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020".

The map has full coverage of the Hungarian territory and shows the actual distribution, extent and frequency of Hungarian ecosystems on national level. Although mapping of agricultural and urban ecosystems was also a goal, the primary target areas of mapping were semi-natural areas. In the preparation of the map top-down and bottom-up mapping approaches were combined, relying both on existing thematic databases and remote sensing images. An important aspect was the use of regularly updated databases, thus allowing the possibility of revising the map. The reference year for the 20 x 20 meter raster map was 2015, but the range of databases used also includes Sentinel optical and radar imagery for 2016 and 2017.

Map characteristics (applicable for any map layer available)

• spatial reference system: ETRS1989 LAEA (EPSG: 3035), and EOV (Hungarian National Reference System, EPSG: 23700),
• geometry: 20 m raster,
• data format: GeoTIFF,
• INSPIRE-compatible metadata descriptions (find it in the downloaded package),
The map is free to use for everyone. It is recommended to use it with a maximum scale of 1: 25000.

945.000 EUR EU+HU Government funding

The map, which gives the full spatial coverage of Hungary and depicts the current most detailed land cover, is the first to show the spatial location and distribution of ecosystems at the national level, separating the individual ecosystem types and using other thematic layers.
The final database provides a good basis for assessing and analyzing the natural state of the country and at the same time provides an opportunity for further evaluation and mapping tasks of the project.

This practice is transferrable but in a limited scale as requires significant resources. Its geographical scope is national so practically can be implemented at country level.