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Land use

Land use Catalonia. 2016
Value (hectares) Percentage (%)
Forest surface 2,054,990 64.0
Wood 1,119,486 34.9
Scrubland 715,777 22.3
Other vegetation 219,727 6.8
Areas without vegetation 104,115 3.2
Cropland 834,159 26.0
Rainfed crops 563,946 17.6
Irrigated crops 270,213 8.4
Urban, urbanisable and infrastructures 215,939 6.7
Total 3,209,203 100.0
Source: Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries and Food.
Land use Spain. 2016
Value (hectares) Percentage (%)
Forest surface 29,337,320 58.0
Areas without vegetation .. Confidential data, low reliability or not available .. Confidential data, low reliability or not available
Cropland 16,985,176 33.6
Urban, urbanisable and infrastructures 4,271,014 8.4
Total 50,593,510 100.0
Source: Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Environment.
Note: A partir del 2005, les "àrees sense vegetació" estan incloses en el sòl "urbà, urbanitzable i infraestructures".
(..) Confidential data, low reliability or not available.

Last update: August 25, 2017. Revised series on July 23, 2019.

Methodological note

Research into the general land distribution in Catalonia summarises the data from the 1-T survey on land areas occupied by crop cultivation, carried out annually by the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries, Food and Natural Environment in each municipality, with the subsequent aggregation of the data to yield the computation per county and for all of Catalonia.

In 2007 improvements were introduced for the production of these statistics, adding new classification criteria based on geographic information tools (SIGPAC), which particularly impacted the classification what is considered other vegetation, which is now largely redistributed as forest or scrubland, while to a lesser degree it meant less area devoted to cultivation. These changes signify that the data are not necessarily comparable to previous years.

Forest land consists of forested areas, occupied by woods and tree farms; woodlands, occupied by shrubland, thickets, brush, heath, bushes, sub-shrubs and forest/shrubland transitional areas; and areas with other vegetation, such as prairies, pastures, grassland, wetland vegetation and barren pasture.

Crop fields consist of parcels of land planted with annual or multi-year species: arable or woody crops, dry-farmed and irrigated land, and land left fallow.

Areas without vegetation, which include bare soils, rocky outcrops, escarpments, rocky ground, gullies, sand banks and beaches, snowfields, lakes, reservoirs and rivers.

Urban areas and infrastructure correspond to land occupied by cities and towns, low-density urban areas, industrial and commercial areas and road networks.

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