GEOLAND2 - Towards an Operational GMES Land Monitoring Core Service

Project ID: 218795

Funded under: FP7-SPACE

Duration: 2008.09.01 – 2012.12.31

Coordinator: AIRBUS DS GMBH – Germany

Participants: Project's partners include companies and institutions from 53 European countries, including ReSAC

Geoland2 is carried out in the context of Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES), a joint initiative of European Commission and European Space Agency within the FP7. Geoland2 is designed to support this initiative, and is focused on land cover change, environmental stress, and global vegetation monitoring in Europe.

The architecture of geoland2 is made of two different layers,

• The Core Mapping Services (CMS) and
• The Core Information Services (CIS).

The three Core Mapping Services CMS produce basic geo-information on land cover and land use and its annual and seasonal changes as well as a variety of additional biophysical parameters describing the continental vegetation state.

The CMS products cover a wide variety of thematic content, spatial scales from local to global, and update frequency, from 1 day to several years.

The 3 Core Mapping Service tasks are:

• Land Cover & Land use (EUROLAND)
• Biogeophysical Parameters (BioPar)
• Seasonal & Annual Change Monitoring (SATChMo)

The Core Information Services (CIS) offer specific information for European environmental policies and international treats on climate change, food security and the sustainable development. The main aim of the CIS Agri-Environment Service project is to contribute to the improvement of more accurate and timely monitoring of agricultural land use state and its changes at European, national and regional levels by providing common methodologies and indicators covering various temporal, spatial and thematic scales.

7 CIS addressing important sectoral policies and showing examples of GMES end-to end services are being set up with the following missions:

• Spatial Planning
• Water
• Agri-Environment
• Forest
• Land Carbon
• Natural Resource Monitoring in Africa (NARMA)
• Global CROP Monitoring (GCM)

As a member of consortium Remote Sensing Application Center (ReSAC) is involved in three sub-projects of Geoland2:

Seasonal & Annual Change Monitoring (SATChMo)

SATChMo is designed to deliver annual and/or seasonal bio- and geophysical parameter maps and statistics for Europe and Africa with an emphasis on agricultural land use and environmental characteristics. The time frequency of the product update is on the order of 3 - 12 months.

The main task for the RESAC is quality of control on the thematic products.

Spatial Planning

The Spatial Planning Core Information Service will provide harmonised EO based products and tools to describe, explain and forecast urban land use changes supporting spatial planning from regional to European scale

Agri-Environmental Indicators Core Information Service (AgriEnv CIS)

Evaluate the utility of the CMS for the supply of EO-based indicators assessing in Europe the impact of agriculture on the environment and the effectiveness of agrienvironmental measures.

Test area is Bulgarian part of the Strymunas-Struma river basin

ReSAC is involved in three sub-projects of:

• Evaluation soil erosion
• Farmland Abandonment
• HNV farmland agricultural land use changes

End user on the services of the Geoland2 project are: Institute of Soil Science and Agroecology “Nikola Pushkarov”, Executive Agency "Electronic Communication Networks and Information Systems" and Ministry of Regional Development and Public Works.

COSMOS: Coordination of Space NCPs as a Means to Optimise Services

Project ID: 218813

Funded under: FP7-SPACE

Duration: 2008.06.01 – 2012.03.31

Coordinator: DEUTSCHES ZENTRUM FUER LUFT - UND RAUMFAHRT EV - Germany

Participants: Project's partners include companies and institutions from 33 European countries, including ReSAC and Space Research and Technology Institute from Bulgaria.

The National Contact Points (NCPs) for Space from 33 countries work together in the project COSMOS. The support action aims at making it easier for applicants to the EU's Seventh Framework Programme for Research (FP7) to find international partners and to exchange good practices.

COSMOS - Cooperation of Space NCPs as a Means to Optimise Services - aims at building network of Space NCPs.