The next step towards implementing the standard in Copernicus Land Monitoring, has been initiated with the start of the CLC+ Core initiative in December 2020.
GAF AG, an e-GEOS (Telespazio/ASI), Austrian–German consortium has been awarded a 3.1 million euro framework service contract by the European Environment Agency to implement and run the CLC+ Core system over the next four years.
Various Copernicus Land Monitoring Service products as well as national land cover and land use datasets will be ingested into a core system, setting the path for the future creation of multiple CLC+ Instances.
“CLC+ addresses the requirements identified for the coming decades. The European Commission’s and the users’ expectations are very high”, said Hans Dufourmont from the European Environment Agency (EEA).
By implementing a flexible data handling approach, CLC+ Core will incorporate existing and future European CLMS products and various national LC/LU products using a standardised integration approach in line with the EAGLE data model.
As Tobias Langanke from EEA highlighted, “This new era of land cover mapping is driven by increased policy requirements, improved technical capabilities and advanced semantic description systems. Moving from ‘classification’ towards ‘description’ involves a shift from traditional mapping approaches towards, e.g., the EAGLE ontology.”
