Operational monitoring services for our changing environment

Abstract

With climate change speeding up and the on-going growth of the World’s population, the pressure on nature, biodiversity and our own living conditions increase steadily. To mitigate these threats, by effective adaptation strategies and counter measures, the frequent monitoring of our environment is crucial to provide decision makers and European citizens with accurate, up-to-date and reliable information on the changing conditions of our natural resources. Benefiting from Earth observation satellite data, the GMES Land Services provide such cross-border harmonised geo-information at global to local scales in a timely and cost-effective manner. These monitoring services have been defined, developed and implemented within a series of projects funded since 2003 by the European Commission (geoland, BOSS4GMES) and the European Space Agency (GSE Land / GSE Forest Monitoring). Building upon the results of the earlier projects, geoland2 now closes the gap between research and the operational implementation of fully mature GMES Land Services, consisting of Core Mapping Services and Core Information Services. The project 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, to guarantee that the products meet the actual user requirements. The Core Mapping Services produce basic geo-information on land surfaces such as cover, use and biophysical parameters along with their annual and seasonal changes. This geo-information can thus describe, for instance, the continental vegetation state, the global radiation budget at the surface and the water cycle on the basis of satellite Earth observation data. The mapping products are of broad generic use being a very valuable information source in themselves. They also form the basis for more specialised geo-information services, i.e. the Core Information Services and further downstream applications. In geoland2 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. Currently they address a broad variety of thematic fields, like for instance: water quality, forest managing, spatial planning, agri-environmental issues, the global carbon cycle, international food security, etc. In the framework of GMES for Africa, biophysical parameters have been provided to the AMESD (African Monitoring of the Environment for Sustainable Development) stations and specific e-tools are being tested to facilitate local data analysis supporting the sustainable management of natural resources.JRC.DDG.H.3-Global environement monitorin