geoland2 - Operational Monitoring Services for our Changing Environment

The architecture of geoland2 is made up of two layers:

The Core Mapping Services produce basic geo-information on land cover and land use and its annual and seasonal changes as well as a variety of additional biophysical parameters describing the continental vegetation state, the radiation budget at the surface and the water cycle on the basis of satellite Earth observation data. The Core Mapping Services cover spatial scales from local to global, and update frequency, from 1 day to several years.

The mapping products are of broad generic use: besides being a valuable information source in their basic form, they are the basis for more specialised geo-information services, focusing on a broad variety of thematic fields, like water quality, forest managing, spatial planning, agri-environmental issues, the carbon cycle, food security, etc.

The Core Mapping Services are: EUROLAND, Biogeophysical Paramters (BioPar) and Seasonal and Annual Change Monitoring (SATChMo).

The Core Information Services are a set of thematic elements that build on Core Mapping Services products and other data sources (including in-situ measurements) to produce 'elaborated' information products addressing specific European Environmental Policies and international treaties on Climate Change, food security and the sustainable development of Africa. They serve to estimate the added value of the Core Mapping Services in comparison to existing approaches and to carry out a utility assessment of selected end-to-end service demonstrations.

The Core Information Services are: Spatial Planning, Agri-Environment Monitoring, Water Monitoring, Forest Monitoring, Land Carbon, Natural Resource Monitoring in Africa (NARMA) and Global Crop Monitoring.