LandMon - TOWARDS THE EXPLOITATION OF NEXT GENERATION SATELLITE MISSIONS FOR OPERATIONAL LAND MONITORING

Experience from European land mapping projects as well as other international and national projects confirmed the feasibility of a coherent satellite based land information mapping capacity. Next generation satellite systems, particularly the up-coming Sentinel-2 mission, have the potential to change the static mapping (i.e. GIO HRL) procedures carried out every 3-5 years to enable a continuous land monitoring. The aim of LandMon is the development and validation of revolutionary processing methods to facilitate and support efficient and regular production of pan-European land monitoring data (HRL, CLC) with S-2 data, thereby guaranteeing continuity of Austrian based service provision, and the demonstration to EEA of a fully automated land cover monitoring capacity in high spatial resolution, facilitating timely analysis and reporting (avoiding today’s time lags of 1-2 years). In view of the EEA, which is formally supporting the project, the implementation of further automation and input-data driven methodological improvements are highly welcome and will contribute to improve European land monitoring. LandMon will enable exceptional increase in efficiency and immediate economic leverage as well as new land monitoring service capacities, such as known from meteorological services.