The EEA coastline dataset is created for detailed analysis with a Minimum Mapping Unit of e.g. 1:100000, for geographical Europe. The coastline is a hybrid product obtained from satellite imagery from two projects:

1) EUHYDRO (Pan-European hydrographic and drainage database) [https://land.copernicus.eu/pan-european/satellite-derived-products/eu-hydro/view] and

2) GSHHG (A Global Self-consistent, Hierarchical, High-resolution Geography Database) [http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/pwessel/gshhg/].

The defining criteria was altitude level = 0 from EUDEM [https://land.copernicus.eu/pan-european/satellite-derived-products/eu-dem/view]. Outside the coverage of the EUDEM, the coastline from GSHHG was used without modifications. A few manual amendments to the dataset were necessary to meet requirements from EU Nature Directives, Water Framework Directive and Marine Strategy Framework Directive. In 2015, several corrections were made in the Kalogeroi Islands (coordinates 38.169, 25.287) and two other Greek little islets (coordinates 36.766264, 23.604318), as well as in the peninsula of Porkkala (around coordinates 59.99, 24.42).

In this revision (v3, 2017), 2 big lagoons have been removed from Baltic region, because, according to HELCOM, are freshwater lagoons.

This dataset is a polygon usable as a water-land mask.