Introduction
| Mitigation of climate change impact by integrated spatial planning is a key element to limit human and socio-economic loss, where, for example, land take by urban growth may lead to increased flood impact through faster run-off. The impervious area and sealing level service within GSE Land offers a solution to monitoring urban growth and soil sealing at the spatial level of administration. It provides spatially referenced and consistent information in support of reporting obligations. The regional administration of Mining, Energy and Geology of Niedersachsen in Germany (Landesamt für Bergbau, Energie und Geologie Niedersachsen – LBEG) has ordered and financed an assessment for the region of Weser-Ems. It was among the first public organization employing this new Earth Observation (EO) intelligence to help mitigate the impact of climate change. GeoVille Group is task manager of the “Impervious areas and sealing levels” application in the ESA-GSE Land Information Services project and implements together with 3 other service providers (GIM, Indra Infoterra) services in 10 European countries. The ESA GSE Stage 2 Project “Land Information Services” is lead by Infoterra GmbH with the objective to deliver cost effective harmonised and standardised geo-information services on land monitoring. SPOT satellite data and aerial photography are used to derive geospatial explicit up-to-date and historical information on the extent, development and density of built-up areas. In addition to homogeneous, high quality maps on land cover/use, the information is integrated with ancillary data in GI procedures and models to analyse describe and understand the drivers, pressure, state and impact of land consumption. Such mapping and downstream products provide views of landtake trends and their impact on representative European areas on the sub-national level. The products describe the pressure, state and impact of urban land-take. They consist of maps, statistics, indicators and scenarios. |
Answers to key policy questions include:
• How much and in what proportions is land being taken for urban and other development?
• Where does the most significant land-take occur?
• What are the drivers of uptake for urban and other artificial land development?
• How many people are affected?
Benefits
• Enriching lump statistics with geospatially explicit information
• Guaranteeing European consistency and comparability
• Facilitating the evaluation of policy options
• Improving decision making through better planning information
• Moving from observing and monitoring to policy evaluation
Product roll-out and response
As part of the GSE Land project, the Lower Saxony counties of Hannover, Braunschweig und Lüneburg were assessed. In order to obtain full coverage of the Federal State Lower Saxony the LBEG has financed mapping of the missing areas in the region Weser-Ems (14.965 km²). The data have been jointly produced by GeoVille group and Infoterra GmbH and will be made available through the online GI system of the regional German administration.
“Responsible for the protection and sustainable use of soils and raw materials in Lower Saxony (Germany), the LBEG looked for a comprehensive and accurate land take monitoring service including information about soil sealing. The products generated by GeoVille through the ESA-GSE Land project fitted our needs but were limited to certain regions. Therefore we decided to order these geo-information products for the entire State of Lower Saxony. These quality-assured information products allow large scale synopsis and provide critical input to our soil information system.”
Dr. Marion Gunreben – State Authority for Mining, Energy and Geology (LBEG); Hannover, Germany
| GeoVille Group is a private sector enterprise located in Austria and Luxembourg. GeoVille Group specialises in products and services related to Earth Observation (EO) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) applications. GeoVille is the leading company in Europe in using satellite data for spatial planning applications |
Tel: +43 (0)512 56 20 21-0
Fax: +43 (0)512 56 20 21-22
Email: info@geoville.com
Web : www.geoville.com
| Infoterra GmbH has been a leader in development and validation of GMES services, focussing on land monitoring, water quality assessment, flood risk management, and spatial planning applications, for several years. The company holds the exclusive commercial exploitation rights for the new high-resolution radar satellite TerraSAR-X and is part of the Infoterra Group and a wholly owned subsidiary of Astrium |
Tel: +49 7545 8 4344
Fax: +49 7545 8 1337
Email: info@infoterra-global.com
Web: www.infoterra-global.com