The Coastal Condition Account accounts for the share of artificial impervious area cover (permanent and temporal), present in coastal area that includes ecosystem type coastal beaches, dunes and wetlands.
A workflow was developed to generate coastal condition accounts based on the Copernicus Imperviousness layer (IMD) - also derived from Earth Observation, and both optical (Sentinel-2) and radar (Sentinel-1) time-series. More information can be found in User Manual and Algorithm Theoretical Base Document.
The python workflow was used to generate offline the ecosystem accounts for the three requested countries, namely specified coastal regions in Italy, Greece and the Netherlands, for the years 2018 and 2021.
| SEALED PIXELS % | |||
| NUTS | NAME | 2018 | 2022 |
| Peloponnese (GR) | 12,4% | 12,4% | |
| EL632 | Achaia | 24,5% | 24,9% |
| EL633 | Ileia | 9,1% | 7,8% |
| EL652 | Korinthia | 24,6% | 24,4% |
| EL653 | Lakonia, Messinia | 7,5% | 7,9% |
| Italian Adriatic Coast (IT) | 14,2% | 14,6% | |
| ITH3 | Veneto | 11,6% | 12,0% |
| ITH5 | Emilia-Romagna | 17,0% | 17,8% |
| ITI3 | Marche | 24,7% | 25,0% |
| ITF1 | Abruzzo | 25,5% | 26,2% |
| ITF2 | Molise | 10,1% | 10,7% |
| ITF4 | Puglia | 11,3% | 11,5% |
| The Netherlands (NL) | 13,0% | 13,5% | |
| NL34 | Zeeland | 19,0% | 18,6% |
| NL33 | Zuid-Holland | 17,4% | 19,1% |
| NL32 | Noord-Holland | 11,2% | 11,8% |
| NL12 | Friesland | 4,9% | 6,5% |
| NL11 | Groningen | 11,6% | 11,9% |
The accounting table shows that in most of the regions the amount of imperviousness is increasing from 2018 to 2022, which would mean a lower condition account.
Italy has compared the account with land consumption maps of Italy which represent the official reference at national level. In general, it was found that the accounts detect the main changes related to soil rating, but the detection of small changes is not accurate and hence underestimates the current account.
The evaluation in Greece shows that the account is in line with the development growth in the tourism and construction sector in Peloponnese.