European forest morphology, mosaic and connectivity Corine Land Cover 1990-2000-2006

The forest morphology is measured with a set of 4 indicators derived from the Morphological Spatial Pattern Application (MSPA) of the GUIDOS software (Soille and Vogt, 2009) with a width of 1 pixel: Core, Edge, Linear, Islet.

The forest mosaic is measured with a set of 3 indicators based on the forest spatial pattern and the composition in terms of agriculture, artificial and natural/semi-natural surfaces in the immediate surroundings (3x3 pixels): core natural, mixed natural, some natural.

The forest connectivity is measured with the Root Probability of Connectivity (RPC) index that quantifies the landscape functional connectivity based on forest patch area, its spatial configuration, inter-patch distances, matrix permeability and specific dispersal capabilities of generic groups of forest-dwelling species. The assessment applies inter-patch Euclidian distances, assuming a homogeneous non-forested matrix, and 50% of dispersal probability at the 1 km distance for forest-dwelling species. RPC is dimensionless and ranges from 0 to 1.

The area and the proportion of the all sets of indicators are reported for the forest cover extracted from Corine Land Cover at 100 m years 1990-2000-2006 (version 15, 08/2011), and aggregated per landscape units of 25 km by 25 km, per provinces (NUTS 2/3) and per country (NUTS 0).