The GLOBCOVER Initiative

The objective of the GLOBCOVER initiative is to develop a global land-cover map for the year 2005, using as main source of data the fine resolution (300m) mode data from MERIS sensor on-board ENVISAT satellite in course of acquisition over the full year 2005. The thematic legend of the final product is intended to be compatible with the FAO Land Cover Classification System (LCCS). The service will be developed in a way that any further update of the Global Land Cover map will be at recurrent cost to run the developed system. This new product is intended to update and to complement the other existing comparable global products, such as the global land cover map at 1 km resolution for the year 2000 (GLC-2000) produced by the JRC. It is also expected to improve such previous global products, in particular through a finer resolution (300m) and the corresponding geolocalisation required to use time series of images to capture the phenological cycle of some vegetation covers. The initiative includes a validation phase similar to the GLC-2000 validation exercise. The GLOBCOVER initiative is leaded by an international network of partners, in particular, JRC, F AO, UNEP, IGBP, GOFC and EEA are considered as the GLOBCOVER partners. The data acquisition and pre-processing is performed by ESA, the development of the GLOBCOVER V1 is developed by a consortium lead by MEDIAS France under contract with ESA and the GLOBCOVER V2 will be developed by JRC once the GLOBCOVER seasonal mosaics will be ready.