The Role of Remote Sensing Techniques for European Land Use Database Construction

Abstract

The development of sound environmental policies relies heavily on the outcome of environmental models which are significantly influenced by the spatial and thematic accuracy of land cover and land use data. European-wide, georeferenced land use and land cover databases are still scarce. The 10 minutes pan-European land use database of the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and Environment (RIVM), which is largely based on statistical data, was a first step towards meeting the demands of environmental monitoring on a European scale (Veldkamp et al., 1995). In comparison with statistical data, satellite remote sensing has the advantage of collecting up-to-date land cover data with a high degree of spatial accuracy. Until recently, land cover data derived from remotely sensed images has only been available for certain countries and regions in Europe. The CORINE land cover project (CORINE, 1993) is one of the relatively few approaches to European land cover mapping, but the CORINE database does not cover the whole of Europe and is based on satellite images from 1986 to 1997. This hampers the use of the database for time series analysis. The PELCOM database (Mucher et al., 2000) is based on NOAA-AVHRR satellite images from 1997 and is the first 1 km European land cover database based on remote sensing images with acquisition dates from the same year. However, the results of the PELCOM project have indicated that, for monitoring purposes, the use of NOAA-AVHRR data is limited. The land cover changes taking place in Europe do not agree with the spatial detail of the NOAA-AVHRR satellite data.