Copernicus Land Monitoring Service
The Copernicus Land Monitoring Service started its activities in mid 2011 as part of the GMES Initial Operations (GIO) and became operational in 2012. The service was built on a series of projects developed within the Framework Programmes 6 and 7 (FP6/FP7), funded by the EC, such as the Geoland-1 and -2. The objective of the GIO Land project was to plan for the full implementation of the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service and to start to provide land cover information to users in the field of environmental and other terrestrial applications. The Service now provides geographical information on land cover and on related variables, for instance to the vegetation state or the water cycle. It supports applications in a variety of domains such as spatial planning, forest management, water management, agriculture and food security.
The service consists of three main components:
- A global component, coordinated by the European Commission DG Joint Research Centre (JRC);
- A Pan-European component, coordinated by the European Environment Agency (EEA)
- A local component, coordinated by the European Environment Agency (EEA).
In addition, the service also supports the generation of a Pan-European Digital Elevation Model (DEM).