Monitoring land changes for effective decision making
Climate change is placing increasing pressure on the Earth's natural resources, biodiversity and human populations. Decision makers require accurate and timely information to adopt effective measures to mitigate these effects. A series of projects funded by the EU (Geoland, Boss4gmes) and the European Space Agency (ESA) (GSE Land / GSE forest monitoring) has addressed this need with the development of monitoring services exploiting Earth Observation (EO) satellite data. The Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) programme coordinated and managed by the EC addresses six thematic areas: land, marine, atmosphere, climate change, emergency management and security. Focusing on the land theme, a consortium of 50 European service providers and over 80 international user organisations are working together. Their goal is to put the last brick in the foundation of a fully functional GMES Land Monitoring Core Service (LMCS). GMES assimilated information in a 'bottom-up' way from local, regional, national, European and international user groups. The initial GMES Land Information Services were primarily mapping related for such parameters as land cover and vegetation. In order to combat effects of climate change, decision makers must have a good understanding of changes in parameters over time. 'Snapshots' taken at particular moments are not sufficient. With EU funding of the 'Towards an operational GMES land monitoring core service' (Geoland2) project, scientists are now expanding the LMCS to provide a full range of services and products. Geoland2 is creating a core information provider on a pan-European and global scale including topics such as energy budget and water cycle, seasonal and annual change monitoring, and the terrestrial carbon cycle to name a very few. Downstream services are targeted to help legally mandated entities perform their functions and eventually to address commercial and/or spin-off applications of GMES skills and data. Geoland2 is providing important new monitoring modules for the GMES LMCS to facilitate evaluation of changes in critical parameters over time. The new information will enable decision makers to make the best informed decisions regarding mitigation of global climate change effects on natural resources and human populations.
