Land Use / Land Cover Monitoring

Land Cover / Land Use Monitoring is a base application for many other subsequent environmental assessment and modelling tasks. Landscape cover – visible layer of the material contents of landscape, identified by means of the physiognomic and morphostructural features of landscape objects – is well registered on Earth observation data, so they are a valuable information source about land cover for different monitoring programmes. More, data on land cover can be linked to the ones on land use and vice versa. In regional dimension recognition of land cover is close to basic categories of land use corresponding also to basic functional features and spatial organisation of cultural landscape as such. Land cover maps therefore became a suitable basis for further spatial analyses of landscape, decision-making and landscape planning tasks. Also, use of Earth observation data with various resolution allows the cost efficient top-down scaling approach to identification of ‘hotspots’ on European, national, regional or local level.

Land cover / land use can be mapped on different level of thematic detail using ad-hoc categorization focusing strictly on particular user needs (e.g. clutter data for the telecom or radio planning industries) or using de-facto standard nomenclature (e.g. CORINE Land Cover, FAO LCCS) for multi-purpose usage. Recently, standard Land monitoring service is even selected as one of the GMES Fast Track Services for pre-operational implementation on European level. Gisat has long term experience in land cover / land use monitoring and mapping for various purposes being also involved from the very beginning in the European CLC project development (e.g. I&CLC2000, CLC2006) as well as being service provider in ESA GSE Land related projects (e.g. SAGE, GUS).

Thematic services:

• user requirements specification and nomenclature setup
• optimal earth observation data selection
• production of standard or custom land cover/land use status maps on various scales (local, regional, national, continental)
• production of standard or custom land cover/land use change maps on various scales (local, regional, national, continental)
• crop rotation monitoring
• small landscape units (SLU) monitoring

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Environmental Accounting

Land cover is a suitable indicator of changes in landscape state, their rate and quality. Land cover represents the materialized projection of natural spatial assets in combination with man-made (artificial objects) or recreated (cultivated objects) in landscape. Study of the changes, above all in the context of a temporal development is necessary for the analysis of causes and consequences of natural and artificial processes, impact assessment, maintenance the ecological stability and biodiversity and its observation in decision-making and planning spheres. Analysis of the land cover changes can help to find out and to study the connections with socio-economical and political interventions of the man in given part of the territory.
GISAT is active in domain of environmental accounting mainly in the frame of Land and Ecosystem Accounts (LEAC) framework development support for the Environmental Environmental Agency and Eurostat, but also for national level projects.

Thematic services:

• status and change land accounts creation (e.g. stock, flows, net change…)
• change typology setup
• change intensity maps creation
• change ‘hot-spot’ assesment
• link creation to socio-economic statistics
• enabling spatial insight into studied phenomena assessment

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Environmental Indicator Development

Environmental indicators tell us about the environment and they have three basic functions: simplification, quantification and communication. They measure the state and pressures on the environment. Their aim is to raise awareness of the environment and show progress towards sustainable development. The indicators combine data across a range of environmental measures. They do not relate solely to spatial data, but Earth observation data or EO-based information as e.g. land cover is important input for their creation. Gisat has long term experience in environmental indicators development mainly from the work for the European Topic Centre supporting European Environmental Agency in the domain of terrestrial environment. Also activities related to agro-environmental indicators has been carried out nationaly (e.g. DAIFOR project).

Thematic services:

• indicators set selection or definition
• indicators development and creation like e.g.:
  • land take and land uptake
  • urban sprawl and soil sealing density
  • fragmentation of land and ecosystems by transport and urban
  • pressure around designated areas
• target assessment

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Water Management Support

Water is emerging as the commodity of the future and therefore sustainable water resources management is becoming more and more hot issue worldwide. In Europe, this fact is reflected by the European Water Framework Directive (WFD). In response to the WFD demands, services addressing geo-information needs related are developed under GMES programme as Earth observation data (and spatial data in general) can contribute a lot into this process. Gisat is also active in this domain, developing and producing core products as the basis of customised end-user applications supporting the national and local implementation of the WFD. Beside the general spatial information provision, the main focus is on rapid production of crop level land cover data, subsequent support of dedicated non-point pollution modelling (e.g. MONERIS NPP Scanner) and delivery of data and statistics qualifying and quantifying nitrate inputs into river basins.

Thematic services:

• spatial data provision supporting WFD
• rapid crop level qualitative and quantitative landcover / landuse information
• water pollution modelling (in cooperation with our modelling partners) as:
  • Risk Analysis
  • Pollution Potentials
  • Status of Discharge
  • Analysis of Sources and Scenario Calculation

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