Story · Europe map · about 3 min
Where Europe is built up, and where it is still wild
Every layer on the Europe map comes from open satellite and census data covering the same window, so they can be stacked and compared. This tour walks across five of them, from where people live to where nature is protected.
Where people live
The European Commission’s population grid spreads census counts onto 1 km squares. The darkest purple marks more than 10,000 people per square kilometre, as in central Paris, and large parts of the map are almost empty. It is a modelled estimate, not a headcount.
Where the buildings are
The same satellites measure how much of each square is covered by building footprints. Even the densest city centre rarely tops 60%, because streets and squares are not buildings: Paris is about 38% built, Madrid and Rome about 45%. Cities stand out as red islands in a pale pink countryside.
How old is it?
Each 1 km square is coloured by when its ground was first built on. The darkest purple, “before 1975”, covers about 57% of Europe’s built-up squares, because the satellite record starts in 1975 and cannot see older ground. Colours then run from violet to yellow for 2015 to 2020. Almere, a Dutch city on reclaimed land founded in 1976, is violet. A rebuilt district keeps its original date.
What covers the ground
Across the whole window, trees cover about 36% of the land, grassland 20%, cropland 16% and bare ground 15%. Buildings, the red cells, are about 1% of it. That is a most-common-class view of 10 metre pixels, so a village in a field disappears.
What is set aside for nature
Natura 2000 is the EU’s network of 27,173 protected sites for rare habitats and birds. Outside the EU, the Council of Europe’s Emerald Network adds 2,578 more, from Norway to Georgia and including the UK. Turkey, Belarus, Russia and Kosovo are in neither. Listed does not mean untouched.
For classrooms and curious minds
Questions to talk about, alone or in a group.
- Why do the biggest cities sit mostly on plains and coasts, not in the mountains?
- Why can a place that was rebuilt in the 1990s still read as built before 1975?
Try it on the map: Switch on population density and the protected sites together and look at where the two almost never meet.
The figures above are calculated from the datasets listed on Data & sources and are approximate: many map layers are modelled or interpolated. Read each layer’s caveats on the map.