Spatial Planning

The Spatial Planning Service provides harmonised and highly accurate Earth Observation based information products and tools to describe, explain and forecast urban land use changes supporting spatial planning from regional to European scale.

The Spatial Planning service builds upon the applicability of core land cover/land use mapping data from the continental GMES Land Monitoring Core Service, which depict the extent, development and density of urban areas and their surrounding landscapes. Subsequently, the maps are integrated with ancillary geospatial and statistical data into geographical information procedures, toolsets and models. These derived information products open the way for analysing demographic developments and urban land take trends and for describing the state of land consumption and its impact on the environment.

The product portfolio consists of a selected set of policy-relevant land take trend indicators (= describe & explain) as well as urban growth scenarios (= forecast) to illustrate the benefit of systematic and geospatially explicit territorial analysis for spatial planning.

The service will resolve two of the major constraints with regard to the usage of spatial planning information: on the one hand the service fosters the usage of geospatially explicit information depicting real-world trends instead of lump statistics on aggregated administrative units, on the other hand it utilises homogeneous core land cover/land use mapping products following high thematic and geometric standards, thus allowing for comparable analyses across administrative boundaries.

• Provision of spatial planning information with an improved spatial resolution and thematic scope;
• Support of spatial planning authorities with consistent and comparable EO based information products and tools to describe, explain and forecast urban land use changes;
• Moving from observing and monitoring to the evaluation of policy options.

For further details please consult the Spatial Planning Service flyer (2,2 MB) or contact the Spatial Planning team by Email.