InCoNaDa Project: Dissemination of land cover and land use information derived from the integration of Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS) products, Copernicus program data, and national databases

The InCoNaDa Project “Dissemination of land cover and land use information derived from the integration of Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS) products, Copernicus program data, and national databases”

This project was funded by the Norwegian Funds through the National Centre for Research and Development under the ‘Applied Research’ program, POLNOR competition. The project is co-financed by the state budget at 15% through a targeted grant.

Authors:

Assessing and monitoring natural resources require detailed and up-to-date spatial data on land cover, land use, and their changes over time. These data are essential for land management, monitoring sustainable development in agriculture, forestry, rural areas, biodiversity assessment, urban planning, and land use. Comprehensive and reliable information on land cover and land use is crucial for reporting processes, such as the emissions and absorptions of greenhouse gases from the land use, land-use change, and forestry (LULUCF) sector, taking climate change mitigation actions, implementing eco-friendly economic strategies (Green Deal), the Common Agricultural Policy, biodiversity protection, and planning for the upcoming Energy Union. Each of these regulations demands a different level of detail regarding land cover, land use, and changes. Land service products – Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS) – are used to some extent in research projects but are rarely included in national mapping, reporting, and monitoring programs conducted by public administration bodies.

The main objective of the InCoNaDa project was to increase the interest in land cover and land use information derived from the integration of Copernicus program data, Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS) products, and national databases.

The objective achieved through the following tasks:

1) Creating land cover maps and land cover change maps based on time series of Sentinel-2 data using machine learning methods;

2) Verification of the EAGLE (EIONET Action Group on Land Monitoring in Europe) concept based on interconnected information on land cover (LC), land use (LU), and other landscape characteristics (CH) available at the national level into a model known as “Linked Data”;

3) Designing and creating a prototype web application tailored to user needs, enabling database querying, product generation, CLMS product integration, and calculation of statistics;

4) Assessing the suitability of individual Copernicus products and a detailed land cover and land use database for spatial planning, urban development, and urban space management in Poland and Norway;

5) Evaluating the suitability of individual Copernicus products and a detailed land cover and land use database for monitoring natural resources, agriculture, and environmental protection in Poland and Norway;

6) Assessing the suitability of individual Copernicus products and a detailed land cover and land use database for reporting greenhouse gas emissions and absorptions in the land use, land-use change, and forestry (LULUCF) sector in Poland and Norway.

Example of biologically active areas obtained from the Copernicus LMS for the city of Łódź and its surroundings, with overlaid boundaries of auxiliary units.

Visualization of combined Small Woody Features and Forest Mask data clipped to the boundaries of Riparian Zones in Poland.