Boosting public
decision-making with
satellite Earth observation

In order to meet the reporting obligations from international conventions, European directives and national legislations, countries are required to produce up to date, detailed and harmonised information on their land cover and its use, at different scales and for different domains of applications. Although Europe can build upon a long experience of land cover and land use mapping, most of the existing national datasets respond to different needs and have been produced with differing standards and methodologies, thus lacking comparability across sectors and are in many cases outdated.

In 2010, GeoVille was commissioned to implement the Land Information System Austria (LISA), with the objective to achieve a national consensus on how to perform a continuous mapping of the national land cover and monitor its change. The aim was to reduce the existing lack of information of different fields such as spatial planning, forestry, agriculture, water and natural hazard management, as well as environmental protection and conservation. Today, the homogenous and seamless land cover product covers an area of 84,000 km² and is available for the year 2016. Its the first available nationwide Sentinel-2 based land cover map.

The full system implementation was funded by the Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology (bmvit) through the Austrian Space Applications Programme (ASAP) as well as the European Space Agency (ESA).