scholarly journals Harmonised LUCAS in-situ land cover and use database for field surveys from 2006 to 2018 in the European Union

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Raphaël d’Andrimont ◽  
Momchil Yordanov ◽  
Laura Martinez-Sanchez ◽  
Beatrice Eiselt ◽  
Alessandra Palmieri ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
European Union ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Environmental Parameters ◽  
Ground Truth ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Full Resolution ◽  
Multi Temporal

Abstract Accurately characterizing land surface changes with Earth Observation requires geo-located ground truth. In the European Union (EU), a tri-annual surveyed sample of land cover and land use has been collected since 2006 under the Land Use/Cover Area frame Survey (LUCAS). A total of 1351293 observations at 651780 unique locations for 106 variables along with 5.4 million photos were collected during five LUCAS surveys. Until now, these data have never been harmonised into one database, limiting full exploitation of the information. This paper describes the LUCAS point sampling/surveying methodology, including collection of standard variables such as land cover, environmental parameters, and full resolution landscape and point photos, and then describes the harmonisation process. The resulting harmonised database is the most comprehensive in-situ dataset on land cover and use in the EU. The database is valuable for geo-spatial and statistical analysis of land use and land cover change. Furthermore, its potential to provide multi-temporal in-situ data will be enhanced by recent computational advances such as deep learning.

scholarly journals LUCAS Copernicus 2018: Earth-observation-relevant in situ data on land cover and use throughout the European Union

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 1119-1133
Author(s):  
Raphaël d'Andrimont ◽  
Astrid Verhegghen ◽  
Michele Meroni ◽  
Guido Lemoine ◽  
Peter Strobl ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
European Union ◽  
High Resolution ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
Earth Observation ◽  
The European Union ◽  
In Situ Data ◽  
Cardinal Directions ◽  
High Resolution Satellite Imagery

Abstract. The Land Use/Cover Area frame Survey (LUCAS) is an evenly spaced in situ land cover and land use ground survey exercise that extends over the whole of the European Union. LUCAS was carried out in 2006, 2009, 2012, 2015, and 2018. A new LUCAS module specifically tailored to Earth observation (EO) was introduced in 2018: the LUCAS Copernicus module. The module surveys the land cover extent up to 51 m in four cardinal directions around a point of observation, offering in situ data compatible with the spatial resolution of high-resolution sensors. However, the use of the Copernicus module being marginal, the goal of the paper is to facilitate its uptake by the EO community. First, the paper summarizes the LUCAS Copernicus protocol to collect homogeneous land cover on a surface area of up to 0.52 ha. Secondly, it proposes a methodology to create a ready-to-use dataset for Earth observation land cover and land use applications with high-resolution satellite imagery. As a result, a total of 63 364 LUCAS points distributed over 26 level-2 land cover classes were surveyed on the ground. Using homogeneous extent information in the four cardinal directions, a polygon was delineated for each of these points. Through geospatial analysis and by semantically linking the LUCAS core and Copernicus module land cover observations, 58 426 polygons are provided with level-3 land cover (66 specific classes including crop type) and land use (38 classes) information as inherited from the LUCAS core observation. The open-access dataset supplied with this paper (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12382667.v4 d'Andrimont, 2020) provides a unique opportunity to train and validate decametric sensor-based products such as those obtained from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellites. A follow-up of the LUCAS Copernicus module is already planned for 2022. In 2022, a simplified version of the LUCAS Copernicus module will be carried out on 150 000 LUCAS points for which in situ surveying is planned. This guarantees a continuity in the effort to find synergies between statistical in situ surveying and the need to collect in situ data relevant for Earth observation in the European Union.

scholarly journals LUCAS Copernicus 2018: Earth Observation relevant in-situ data on land cover throughout the European Union

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raphaël d'Andrimont ◽  
Astrid Verhegghen ◽  
Michele Meroni ◽  
Guido Lemoine ◽  
Peter Strobl ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
European Union ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
Earth Observation ◽  
The European Union ◽  
In Situ Data ◽  
Ground Survey ◽  
Level 3 ◽  
High Resolution Satellite Imagery

Abstract. The Land Use/Cover Area frame Survey (LUCAS) is a regular in-situ land cover and land use ground survey exercise that extends over the whole of the European Union. LUCAS was carried out in 2006, 2009, 2012, 2015, and 2018. A new LUCAS module specifically tailored to Earth Observation was introduced in 2018: the LUCAS Copernicus module, aiming at surveying land cover extent up to 51 meters in four cardinal directions around a point of observation. This paper first summarizes the LUCAS Copernicus protocol to collect homogeneous land cover on a surface area of up to a 0.52 ha. Secondly, it proposes a methodology to create a ready-to-use dataset for Earth Observation land cover and land use applications with high resolution satellite imagery. As a result, a total of 63,364 LUCAS points distributed over 26 level-2 land cover classes were surveyed on the ground. Using homogeneous extent information in the four cardinal direction, a polygon was delineated for each of such point. Through geo-spatial analysis and by semantically linking the LUCAS core and Copernicus land cover observations, 58,428 polygons are provided with a level-3 land cover (66 specific classes including crop type) and land use (38 classes) information as inherited from the LUCAS core observation. The open-access dataset supplied with this manuscript (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12382667.v3) provides a unique opportunity to train and validate decametric sensor-based products such as those obtained from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 and -2 satellites. A follow-up of the LUCAS Copernicus module is already planned for 2022. In 2022, a simplified version of the LUCAS Copernicus module will be carried out on 150,000 LUCAS points for which in-situ surveying is planned. This guarantees a continuity in the effort to find synergies between statistical in-situ surveying and the need to collect in-situ data relevant for Earth Observation in the European Union.

RapidAI4EO: Advancing the State-of-the-Art in Continuous Land Monitoring

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanni Marchisio ◽  
Patrick Helber ◽  
Benjamin Bischke ◽  
Tim Davis ◽  
Annett Wania
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
European Union ◽  
Time Series ◽  
High Resolution ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Third Party ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Horizon 2020 ◽  
High Cadence

<p>New catalogues of nearly daily or even intraday temporal data will soon dominate the global archives. However, there has been little exploration of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to leverage the high cadence that is already possible to achieve through the fusion of multiscale, multimodal sensors. Under the sponsorship of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme, RapidAI4EO will establish the foundations for the next generation of Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS) products. Focus is on the CORINE Land Cover programme, which is the flagship of CLMS. </p><p>Specific objectives of the project are to: 1) explore and stimulate the development of new spatiotemporal monitoring applications based on the latest advances in AI and Deep Learning (DL); 2) demonstrate the fusion of Copernicus high resolution satellite imagery and third party very high resolution imagery; 3) provide intensified monitoring of Land Use and Land Cover, and Land Use change at a much higher level of detail and temporal cadence than it is possible today. </p><p>Our strategy is two-fold. The first aspect involves developing vastly improved DL architectures to model the phenomenology inherent in high cadence observations with focus on disentangling phenology from structural change. The second involves providing critical training data to drive advancement in the Copernicus community and ecosystem well beyond the lifetime of this project. To this end we will create the most complete and dense spatiotemporal training sets ever, combining Sentinel-2 with daily, harmonized, cloud-free, gap filled, multispectral 3m time series resulting from fusion of open satellite data with Planet imagery at as many as 500,000 patch locations over Europe. The daily time series will span the entire year 2018, to coincide with the latest release of CORINE. We plan to open source these datasets for the benefit of the entire remote sensing community.</p><p>This talk focuses on the description of the datasets whose inspirations comes from the recently released EuroSAT (Helbert et al, 2019) and BigEarthNet corpora (Sumbul et al, 2019). The new corpora will look at the intersection of CORINE 2018 with all the countries in the EU, balancing relative country surface with relative LULC distribution and most notably adding the daily high resolution time series at all locations for the year 2018. Annotations will be based on the CORINE ontology. The higher spatial resolution will support modeling of more LC classes, while the added  temporal dimension should enable disambiguation of land covers across diverse climate zones, as well as an improved understanding of land use.</p><p>This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101004356.</p>

scholarly journals Land-Use Change Impacts from Sustainable Hydropower Production in EU28 Region: An Empirical Analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (9) ◽  
pp. 4599
Author(s):  
Mohd Alsaleh ◽  
Muhammad Mansur Abdulwakil ◽  
Abdul Samad Abdul-Rahim
Keyword(s):  
Carbon Dioxide ◽  
Land Use ◽  
European Union ◽  
Land Use Change ◽  
Carbon Dioxide Emissions ◽  
Energy Production ◽  
Land Use Changes ◽  
Ordinary Least Squares ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Hydropower Production

Under the current European Union (EU) constitution approved in May 2018, EU countries ought to guarantee that estimated greenhouse-gas releases from land use, land-use change, or forestry are entirely compensated by an equivalent accounted removal of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air during the period between 2021 and 2030. This study investigates the effect of sustainable hydropower production on land-use change in the European Union (EU28) region countries during 1990–2018, using the fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS). The results revealed that land-use change incline with an increase in hydropower energy production. In addition, economic growth, carbon dioxide emissions, and population density are found to be increasing land-use changes, while institutional quality is found to be decreasing land-use change significantly. The finding implies that land-use change in EU28 region countries can be significantly increased by mounting the amount of hydropower energy production to achieve Energy Union aims by 2030. This will finally be spread to combat climate change and environmental pollution. The findings are considered robust as they were checked with DOLS and pooled OLS. The research suggests that the EU28 countries pay attention to the share of hydropower in their renewable energy combination to minimize carbon releases. Politicians and investors in the EU28 region ought to invest further in the efficiency and sustainability of hydropower generation to increase its production and accessibility without further degradation of forest and agricultural conditions. The authorities of the EU28 region should emphasize on efficiency and sustainability of hydropower energy with land-use management to achieve the international commitments for climate, biodiversity, and sustainable development, reduce dependence on fossil fuel, and energy insecurity.

scholarly journals Cropland Abandonment in Slovakia: Analysis and Comparison of Different Data Sources

Land ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 334
Author(s):  
Juraj Lieskovský ◽  
Dana Lieskovská
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
Spatial Data ◽  
Data Sources ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
Corine Land Cover ◽  
Cropland Area ◽  
Cropland Abandonment ◽  
Multi Temporal

This study compares different nationwide multi-temporal spatial data sources and analyzes the cropland area, cropland abandonment rates and transformation of cropland to other land cover/land use categories in Slovakia. Four multi-temporal land cover/land use data sources were used: The Historic Land Dynamics Assessment (HILDA), the Carpathian Historical Land Use Dataset (CHLUD), CORINE Land Cover (CLC) data and Landsat images classification. We hypothesized that because of the different spatial, temporal and thematic resolution of the datasets, there would be differences in the resulting cropland abandonment rates. We validated the datasets, compared the differences, interpreted the results and combined the information from the different datasets to form an overall picture of long-term cropland abandonment in Slovakia. The cropland area increased until the Second World War, but then decreased after transition to the communist regime and sharply declined following the 1989 transition to an open market economy. A total of 49% of cropland area has been transformed to grassland, 34% to forest and 15% to urban areas. The Historical Carpathian dataset is the more reliable long-term dataset, and it records 19.65 km2/year average cropland abandonment for 1836–1937, 154.44 km2/year for 1938–1955 and 140.21 km2/year for 1956–2012. In comparison, the Landsat, as a recent data source, records 142.02 km2/year abandonment for 1985–2000 and 89.42 km2/year for 2000–2010. These rates, however, would be higher if the dataset contained urbanisation data and more precise information on afforestation. The CORINE Land Cover reflects changes larger than 5 ha, and therefore the reported cropland abandonment rates are lower.

scholarly journals Spatiotemporal Influence of Land Use/Land Cover Change Dynamics on Surface Urban Heat Island: A Case Study of Abuja Metropolis, Nigeria

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 272
Author(s):  
Auwalu Faisal Koko ◽  
Wu Yue ◽  
Ghali Abdullahi Abubakar ◽  
Akram Ahmed Noman Alabsi ◽  
Roknisadeh Hamed
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
Urban Expansion ◽  
Urban Heat Islands ◽  
Sustainable Land Use ◽  
Land Use Land Cover ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Rapid Urbanization ◽  
Urban Heat

Rapid urbanization in cities and urban centers has recently contributed to notable land use/land cover (LULC) changes, affecting both the climate and environment. Therefore, this study seeks to analyze changes in LULC and its spatiotemporal influence on the surface urban heat islands (UHI) in Abuja metropolis, Nigeria. To achieve this, we employed Multi-temporal Landsat data to monitor the study area’s LULC pattern and land surface temperature (LST) over the last 29 years. The study then analyzed the relationship between LULC, LST, and other vital spectral indices comprising NDVI and NDBI using correlation analysis. The results revealed a significant urban expansion with the transformation of 358.3 sq. km of natural surface into built-up areas. It further showed a considerable increase in the mean LST of Abuja metropolis from 30.65 °C in 1990 to 32.69 °C in 2019, with a notable increase of 2.53 °C between 2009 and 2019. The results also indicated an inverse relationship between LST and NDVI and a positive connection between LST and NDBI. This implies that urban expansion and vegetation decrease influences the development of surface UHI through increased LST. Therefore, the study’s findings will significantly help urban-planners and decision-makers implement sustainable land-use strategies and management for the city.

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