GAF AG: Copernicus Land Monitoring: High-Resolution Layers 2018 kick off!

The European Environment Agency (EEA) has entrusted GAF AG with the latest update of the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service’s High-Resolution Layers FOREST and GRASSLAND.

In the presence of representatives from the European Environment Agency (EEA), the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Topic Centre on Urban, Land and Soil Systems (ETC-ULS), the High-Resolution Layer (HRL)update 2018 kicked off on 21/22 Jan. 2019 in Copenhagen. Based on full time series of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 observations, the GAF-led team will perform a pan-European consistent update of HRL Forest and Grassland characteristics for all EEA-39 countries (approx. 6 million km²) at an unprecedented spatial resolution of 10m.

The HRLs are part of the land use/land cover mapping component of the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS), serving a broad user community from European public bodies to Member States and regional environmental authorities, as well as the value-adding sector. They provide support to various environmental policies and political decision-making, and significantly contribute to assessing Europe’s current environmental status and monitoring changes over time.

The chosen cloud-based processing approach, in combination with GAF’s state-of-the-art developments in data analytics, will make full use of the powerful Copernicus Data and Information Access Service (DIAS) processing capabilities provided by Mundi Web Services. This setup will also pave the way for future high-resolution monitoring towards global-scale applications.

These tasks will be implemented together with our partners GeoVille and e-GEOS (for Grassland) and SIRS (for Forest), supported by Telespazio Ibérica. All final products will be made freely available by the EEA via the CLMS portal (http://land.copernicus.eu).