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Land Cover & Land Use
SIG Summary
This new Special Interest Group will address a significant area of activity within the Society related to the mapping and assessment of land cover and land use. Land cover and land use mapping has been around from the earliest days of remote sensing, but is constantly evolving with changing technology and user requirements.
SIG Activities
Land cover and land use are now in the spotlight in terms of evidence-based policy and European Directives. For instance INSPIRE, the Habitats Directive, the Water Framework Directive and the Common Agricultural Policy either address standards for or demand monitoring of land surface features at the European level. There is also a considerable amount of ongoing European research and development (BOSS4GMES, GEOLAND 2), operational GMES Fast Track Services, the proposed European Land Monitoring Core Service and national mapping activities. In the UK, the LCM series of products are sponsored by government departments to develop and support evidence-based policy (e.g. many Defra activities use land cover information).
Land cover and land use mapping and assessment continue to be areas of active development in terms of nomenclatures, data models, scales and extents, classification approaches (e.g. pixel, segment, parcel, hybrid-based), product specifications and / or services, technology push and user pull.
There are a series of key issues which drive the research:
• Land cover and land use are often confused, but this has a huge impacts on the approach and success of a product or service.
• Different approaches are applied at different scales, often without the reasons behind the decisions being compiled, discussed or compared.
• Multiple requirements exist for local, regional, national and European studies resulting in very different products, but these studies must work towards integration, generalisation or interoperability.
• There is poor communication between the academic and non-academic communities with often little interaction between advances of blue-skies research and the requirements and practicalities operational implementations.
Based on the above factors the main objectives of this SIG are to build a forum for discussion and comparison of different approaches to land cover and land use classification and mapping. It should be a meeting point where academic and non-academic institutions have the chance to exchange ideas and experiences. The work of the SIG could be focused are a series of working groups which contribute to current issues, such as interoperability, generalisation, classification schemes and mapping methods.
SIG Convenor
Dr. Carolina Sanchez-Hernandez and Dr. Geoff Smith -
