GEOLAND2 - Towards an operational GMES land monitoring core service; first results of the biogeophysical parameter core mapping service

The European GMES initiative provides a political framework for future implementations of Services Centres related to environmental applications. The FP7/geoland2 project is the last brick towards the implementation of fully mature GMES Land Services, consisting of Core Mapping Services (CMS) and Core Information Services (CIS). Its goal is to build, validate and demonstrate operational processing lines and products on a user-driven basis. The CMS produce “basic” geo-information on the land state covering a wide variety of thematic content, spatial scales from local to global, and update frequency from sub-daily to several years. Besides being a valuable information source by their own, the “basic” products are input for the Core Information Services focusing on a broad variety of thematic fields, like water quality, forest management, spatial planning, agri-environmental issues,carbon cycle analysis, supporting the European environmental policies and international treaties on climate change, food security,and sustainable development. The Bio-geophysical Parameter (BioPar) CMS aims at setting-up operational infrastructures for providing regional, continental, and global variables describing the vegetation state, the radiation budget at the surface, and the water cycle, both in near real time and off-line mode. The concept, the objectives, and the structure of geoland2, and of the BioPar CMS, in the European GMES context are introduced. The research, development, production, and validation activities of the BioPar CMS are presented with a special focus on the first biophysical products available to the institutional users, and to the scientific community.