The objective of the pan-European project CORINE Land Cover (CLC) is the provision of a unique and comparable data set of land cover for Europe. It is part of the European Union programme CORINE (Coordination of Information on the Environment). The mapping of the land cover and land use was performed on the basis of satellite remote sensing images on a scale of 1:100,000. The first CLC data base CLC1990, which was finalised in the 1990s, consistently provided land use information comprising 44 classes, out of which 37 classes are relevant in Germany.

In the project CORINE Land Cover 2000 (CLC2000) an update of the database and a mapping of changes have been accomplished using the year 2000 as reference. The project CLC2000, which resulted in area-wide land use and land use change maps of Germany, was led by the German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD) of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) on behalf of the Federal Environmental Agency (UBA). With CLC2000 a reliable, objective and comparable data base for the description of the current situation and the analysis of changes during the decade between 1990 and 2000 is now available.