Dealing with the uncertainty of technical changes in the CORINE Land Cover dataset: The Portuguese approach

•Users require the use of multi-temporal Land Use Cover datasets that show coherent changes over time.•The CORINE Status Layers of Portugal show important disagreements and technical changes over the years.•Portugal has implemented a method to backdate CLC that reduces the uncertainties of the dataset.•The Portuguese CLC backdating method could be exported to other European countries.