Objectives

The objective of the Observatory for Spatial Planning (OSP) is to use innovative Earth Observation derived land cover / land use (LC/LU) products to support spatial planning procedures and methods at European, national and sub-national level.

A central issue of the approach is the exploitation of land cover information, derived from SPOT or Landsat (i.e. IMAGE 2000) data by the Observatory and the geoland core service. The implemented tools allow the combination of the extracted land cover information with statistical socio-economic data for providing geospatial explicit information. The implementation of the approach includes a testing and validation phase. Training as well as dissemination activities serve to generate a sustainable product portfolio having a direct applicability to existing workflows within the user community.

With the project results of the Observatory for Spatial Planning (OSP), the Commission, the Member States and regions will have significant information products and tools for spatial planning at their disposal. These tools will enable spatial planners to more efficiently detect and counteract problems of unbalanced and unsustainable spatial development. The actual results will comprise cartographic illustrations, statistics, indicators, typologies and scenarios allowing for systematic and geospatial explicit territorial analysis. The latter can be seen as an important issue for reconciling social, economic and environmental issues in the sense of sustainability.