The annual land take in 36 European countries was about 1 120 km2 in 2000-06. In the 21 countries for which data are available for both 1990-2000 and 2000-06, the annual land take was 9% higher in the second period. The composition of the land areas taken changed from pasture and mosaic farmland to arable land and permanent crops, and to more forests, grasslands and open spaces. The results show that geographic information data are a key and underexploited resource for monitoring the state of local environmental assets in regions and cities of different sizes and for producing internationally comparable indicators with the largest possible coverage of OECD and non-OECD countries. However, a more detailed picture of the distribution of natural vegetation within countries, obtained by superimposing the MODIS Land Cover dataset onto boundaries of small regions, shows that inter-regional differences are higher than 60 percentage points in half of the 38 countries considered.