THE EAGLE CONCEPT FOR A NEW EUROPEAN LAND
MONITORING FRAMEWORK
N. Valcarcel1, S. Arnold2, G. Banko3, M. Bock4 G. Hazeu5, B. Kosztra6, G. Smith7.
1
National Geographic Institute of Spain, Madrid, Spain
2
Federal Statistical Office DeSTATIS, Wiesbaden, Gernamy
3
Environment Agency Austria, Vienna, Austria
4
German Aerospace Center, Bonn, Germany
5
Alterra – Wageningen University and Research Centre, Wageningen, the Netherlands
6
Intitute of Geodesy Cartography and Remote Sensing, Budapest, Hungary
7
Specto Natura Ltd., Cambridge, United Kingdom
ABSTRACT
Geospatial land cover and land use (LC/LU) information is required by many
international, European and national agreements, commitments and legislations such as
the Framework Convention on Climate Change of the United Nations, Habitat and
Water Framework Directives of the European Union etc. These two key categories of
geospatial environmental data are also clearly reflected in the European INSPIRE
Directive as two separate themes. The need for land information at higher spatial and
thematic resolution has become an urgent issue on European, national and sub-national
levels, resulting in various initiatives and international and European programs such as
GEO GEOSS, Copernicus (formerly known as GMES) among others.
Traditionally, the diversity of end users purposes and applications working with with
land cover (LC) and land use (LU) information has lead to many different classification
systems and nomenclatures for describing the Earth´s surface in the field of land
monitoring, according to specific user requirements, drivers, methodology and heritage.
In addition, LC and LU concepts are strongly interconnected; therefore most of the
existing classification systems combine a mixture of LC and LU information, often
within the same class definition. Each classification system usually emphasizes different
aspects of LC and LU according to specific needs which drove its development. Finally,
the different data collection methods, cartographic aspects, such as minimum mapping
units and scales, narrow tailored-to-purpose definitions and lack of completeness affect
strongly the resulting LC or LU information making comparability between the
resulting datasets very difficult.
In the absence of alternatives, the well-established CORINE Land Cover programme
(CLC) has been traditionally used as the de-facto standard for harmonized LC/LU
information in Europe. However, CLC programme and nomenclature, with its technical
and semantic limitations, does not fully suit the current and future diverse user
requirements, and the need for LC and LU information with higher spatial, thematic and
temporal resolution. As a consequence, more and more European countries are
developing their own decentralized national programmes for land information mapping
and modelling. From the European side, land monitoring have been addressed centrally
by the Copernicus (previously GMES) programme, through the development of a Land
Monitoring Core service made up of three components: global, continental and local.
There is therefore now an urgent need for consistently integrating and harmonizing both
decentralized (bottom-up) and centralized (top-down) approaches for European land
monitoring. INSPIRE in Europe has developed the appropriate legal framework for this
cooperation, giving legal support for the long term actions required for harmonization of
environmental spatial data, but further and decisive steps should be taken by European
and national stakeholders to coordinate and rationalize data production, taking into
account that duplication of geospatial data capture should be avoided.
The EAGLE group (EIONET Action Group on Land monitoring in Europe) was formed
to provide technical and organizational proposals for this coordination. EAGLE is a
voluntary network of national land monitoring experts under the umbrella of the
European Environment Agency. The main technical aim of this working group is to
provide a European conceptual data model, developed by object-oriented data
modelling techniques, that: (1) separates LC from LU information and other landscape
characteristics; (2) supplies a comprehensive representation of both LC and LU
information; (3) allows the use of information from national datasets to support a
European Land Monitoring System through a “bottom-up” approach; and (4) exploits
the pan-European products being provided by Copernicus (e.g. CLC, High Resolution
Layers).
The outcome of the EAGLE work so far is a semantic model, either represented as an
UML chart or as a matrix in form of an Excel table, both having the same conceptual
content. This model can be used as a tool for standardizing the componential description
of LC / LU classes and thus for facilitating semantic transformation between
classification
systems.
The
model
is
structured
in
three
blocks:
(1) land cover components, (2) land use attributes and (3) further characteristics (e.g.
land management, status, spatial and temporal patterns, biophysical parameters, habitat /
ecosystems types).
An important principle during the development of the data model is the connection and
compliance with other existing established nomenclatures and standards (e.g. CORINE
Land Cover, INSPIRE Data Specifications, ISO TC 211, LCML, LUCAS) as well as
being flexible enough to react to any modifications to existing standards or also future
emerging modelling activities. Based on the results of further testing phases against
national and European data sets, fine tuning of the data model and tool developments
ahead, the long-term aim is to produce a data model for supporting the “bottom-up”
approach and enhancing the environmental data flow in the future European land
monitoring framework.
The proposals, concepts and work to date of the EAGLE group provide the vital
integration across land monitoring activities which consist of centralized and
decentralized approaches, national and European requirements and LC and LU
definitions.