With the ongoing climate change, the pressure on nature biodiversity and our own living conditions increases steadily. To mitigate these threats by effective adaptation strategies and counter measures a frequent and area-wide monitoring of the environment is crucial to provide decision makers with accurate, up-to-date and reliable information on the changing conditions of our natural resources.
Within the GMES initiative (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) the Land Services provide cross-border harmonised geo-information at global to local scales in a time- and cost-effective manner. These monitoring services have been defined, developed and implemented within a series of projects funded by the European Commission (geoland, BOSS4GMES) and the European Space Agency (GSE Land, GSE Forest Monitoring).
Building upon their results, geoland2 aims to organise a qualified production network, to build, validate and demonstrate operational processing lines and to set-up a user driven product quality assurance process.
The architecture of geoland2 is made up of two layers: The Core Mapping Services provide land cover, land use and land cover change, as well as a range of bio-physical parameters as an input to more elaborated products while the Core Information Services offer specific information for European Environmental Policies and international treaties on Climate Change, food security and the sustainable development of Africa.