GlobCover is an ESA initiative which began in 01/01/2005 in partnership with JRC, EEA, FAO, UNEP, GOFC-GOLD and IGBP. The GlobCover project has developed a service capable of delivering global composites and land cover maps using as input observations from the 300m MERIS sensor on board the ENVISAT satellite mission. The GlobCover 2009 land cover map is derived by an automatic and regionally-tuned classification of a time series of global MERIS (MEdium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer) FR mosaics for the year 2009. The global land cover map counts 22 land cover classes defined with the United Nations (UN) Land Cover Classification System (LCCS).