Total surface and total land area of Latvia
1. Contact
Responsible agency
Unit
Contact person
Position
Email (agency)
Phone
2. Statistical presentation
Data description
Total surface area of Latvia and total land area, including length of borders, inland waters, as well as protected natural areas.
Total land area data are used for calculation of relative indicators that are applicable to areas, for example, to population density or land use and other statistics.
Statistical concepts and definitions
Statistical unit
Regions, cities, municipalities, towns and rural territories and their area.
Statistical population
Latvia.
3. Institutional mandate
Legal acts and other agreements
N/A
4. Accessibility and clarity
On-line database
5. Comparability
Comparability - geographical
EU data on Eurostat website.
Length of comparable time series
The areas published prior based on the State Land Service data, including land reports, do not meet the actual situation, as were estimated in LKS-92 (EPSG:3059) projected coordinate system without taking into account scale factor. At the beginning of 2020, the total area of Latvia is 23.8 km² wider than that estimated with LKS-92 coordinate system without using scale factor.
6. Coherence
Coherence- cross domain
N/A
7. Statistical processing
Source data
- The territorial division spatial data acquired from the State Address Register of the State Land Service.
- The topographic map in scale 1:10 000 (3rd cycle data on the time period 2009–2016 (data of the layer hidro_a)) managed by the Latvian Geospatial Information Agency.
- Spatial data on specially protected natural areas published by the Nature Conservation Agency.
Data collection
Data collected from public sources.
Data compilation
Estimate of the total area is made based on the territorial division spatial data acquired from the State Address Register.
Land areas are estimated by deducting areas of waterbeds (calculated based on the topographic map in scale 1:10 000) from the total area. Polygons of the waterbeds in map sheets not exceeding 0.1 ha are not taken into account. Coastline of the sea is based on the boundary of the territorial units; maritime area of the topographic map is included among the inland waters.
The area of hierarchically higher territorial units is obtained by summing areas of hierarchically lower territorial units. The difference between the total area of Latvia and that obtained by summing up units of a hierarchically lower territorial division is insignificant (the last one at the beginning of 2010 is by 10 m² smaller).
Area of protected natural areas is calculated based on the spatial data on specially protected natural areas without overlapping. Territory of the North Vidzeme Biosphere Reserve outside nature reserves and nature parks, as well as marine protected areas are excluded.
To ensure that the areas are comparable with those of other European countries, the estimates were made in ETRS89/ETRS-LAEA (EPSG:3035) projected coordinate system preserving areas.