Objectives

Land cover/land use data forms the basis for applications such as Natura 2000 site monitoring, habitat monitoring in the wider countryside, biodiversity modelling, and landscape metrics.  ONP aims to offer a ‘best practice’ portfolio of remote sensing data strategies, methodologies and information products.  This will federate experience from recent Framework-5 projects and taking advantage of the latest remote sensing systems with improved temporal and spatial resolutions. Such methods, once demonstrated and with a guarantee of continuity, will allow efficiencies and cost savings to the user in better targeted field mapping and monitoring.

Many national mapping inventories are based on aerial and field-based surveying. We see this continuing, though Satellite Remote Sensing can bring benefits of frequent update and wider synoptic coverage, to compliment such national mapping.

• to highlight ‘where to look’, and provide the wider landscape perspective for large regions or trans-border situations (e.g. the Alpine region)
• to highlight ‘where to look’, and provide the wider landscape context to fixed monitoring sites, which emphasize fieldwork but only sample the landscape. Also, in spatially complex agricultural landscapes, habitats are often small but widely distributed,
• VHR imagery and airborne data are valuable for the mapping of the fixed sites themselves and their immediate surroundings, especially in support of stratified landscape sampling schemes that give the promise of a pan-European approach.

The work of ONP is mostly addressing users at the sub-national level, with the exception of the Alpine Convention (which is trans-national).  Nevertheless, ONP is able to contribute nature-pertinent class definitions to the current wide discussion on European-level land cover updating, as part of the GMES ‘Land Monitoring’ theme.  This will succeed the earlier CORINE approach, with more focus in future on automated methods and higher resolutions.

ONP work focuses on:

• A data service for users with clear plans and internal skills to exploit Earth Observation/Remote Sensing data.
• An advisory service providing guidelines for data and analysis concepts. ONP develops a habitat interpretation guideline database, as well as guidelines for remote sensing based assessment of FFH & Annex 1 habitats.
• A product service for users without internal remote sensing skills, but where remote sensing has achieved an operational role.