First, validated Sentinel-2 based land cover map
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 Thus, they lack comparability across sectors and are in many cases outdated.
To this end, GeoVille set-up a unique solution for monitoring every country in Europe in high spatial resolution and in dense time intervals. The fully-automatic, dynamic, land-monitoring solution is based on highly-advanced processing technologies and is available as a direct service on landmonitoring.earth or as B2B API services, ready to be integrated into client workflows or business solutions. Thereby, it enables continuous information feeds to web-based Land Information Systems (LIS), geoportals, platforms or any analytical IT systems.
The first national implementation is a validated Sentinel-2 based, homogenous and seamless land cover map for entire Austria covering an area of 84,000 km². The map is integrated into the Land Information System Austria (LISA) that was implemented 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 dynamic product is available at a monthly frequency and comprises information such as agricultural activities, changes in ecosystem conditions and the management intensity of grassland areas. Thereby, it reduces the existing lack of information is various fields such as spatial planning, forestry, agriculture, water as well as environmental protection and conservation.
