The INSPIRE Database and Geoportal

  1. Français non disponible
  2. English

The Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (INSPIRE) Directive has created a European Union comprehensive spatial data infrastructure for EU environmental policies and policies or activities that may impact the environment.

The INSPIRE infrastructure is accessible through the INSPIRE ‘Geoportal’.

The Geoportal allows for:

  • monitoring the availability of INSPIRE data sets;
  • discovering suitable data sets based on their descriptions (metadata);
  • accessing the selected data sets by invoking spatial data services and APIs.

It allows interested parties to browse and query suitable data sets through the Priority Data Sets Viewer and the Thematic Viewer.

The priority data sets viewer provides two handy tools for exploring and accessing available data: the Environmental Domains tool and the Environmental Reporting Legislation tool.

The Environmental Domains tool groups data under seven environmental domains:

The Environmental Reporting Legislation tool groups data by environmental reporting obligations.

The INSPIRE Thematic Viewer provides access to the following 34 data themes organised by the annexes of the INSPIRE Directive:

Annexe I themes:

Annexe II themes:

Annexe III themes:

For each of the 34 themes, INSPIRE documents its definition, description, scope, use examples, EU policies associated with the theme and its links and overlaps with other themes. While these 34 themes and their data address many primary use cases, they often need to be extended to serve national and domain-specific needs. INSPIRE collects and documents best practices for extending data models and provides a list of such models. For example, the EAGLE Data Model further develops the INSPIRE specifications for ‘land use’ to satisfy European Environment Agency (EEA) requirements for land cover data.

INSPIRE infrastructure and access through the geoportal
Relevance for monitoring and evaluation of the CAP

Access to environmental spatial data:

The spatial data accumulated in the INSPIRE Database can be beneficial to monitoring and evaluation at various stages and for different objectives. For example, data on the spatial extent of Nitrate Vulnerable Zones (NVZ) can assist in setting up a monitoring framework of agri-environmental measures targeting the control of nitrate surplus. The same data, combined with IACS/LPIS data, can delineate those farmers who may be eligible for joining a nutrient control programme (e.g. assisting the monitoring of R.21). Similarly, once the above hypothetical programme controlling nutrients has finished, the evaluator will be able to extract the population of beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries for drawing samples for a counterfactual survey. The evaluator can also utilise the INSPIRE dataset on water monitoring stations to support work on R.21.

Almost all INSPIRE data have the same versatility and multipurpose properties as the NVZ example above concerning monitoring and evaluation. For example, soil data and soil maps in INSPIRE can be an indispensable input for evaluating the impacts of various measures on soil erosion (I.13) or soil carbon storage (R.14). At the same time, a soil map or spatially organised soil data like the ones stored in the INSPIRE database can be a valuable support for estimating irrigation water needs in the course of evaluating pressure on water resources (I.17) or assessing the programme’s results on sustainable water use (R.22).

The Geoportal relates stored data with the 34 themes, the seven environmental domains and Member States' environmental reporting obligations. This ready-to-use classification facilitates reporting, monitoring, and evaluation, especially of the effects of various non-agricultural policies such as the WFD or the Birds Directive on agriculture and rural development.

Last modification date: 
09/12/2021