Observatory Nature Protection (ONP): The Norwegian part of ONP, the “Mountain Monitoring Services”, addresses the needs of the Norwegian users with respect to the areas above the tree line. These areas comprise a considerable part of the Norwegian land area, and are important for the country in terms of vegetation, landscape and snow cover. Norwegian authorities require special information on mountain environments in order to complement existing information systems. This includes information about vegetation and snow. NR has tested and developed algorithms related to these topics, which resulted in the products Vegetation Change, Snow Cover Distribution and Snow Surface Wetness.

 

Core Service Land Cover (CSL): For the Core Service Landcover in the Geoland project a method review of the state of the art of multi-sensor, multi-scale and multitemporal classification approaches was carried out. Multi-sensor, multi-scale and multi-temporal techniques are becoming increasingly interesting as satellite platforms with a large number of sensors are coming, and a huge number of satellites with one or a few sensors emerge. Methods that can exploit this information are therefore needed. According to the ongoing discussion on a European Core Service Land Monitoring of special importance is the issue of technically feasible and efficient change detection methods. Hence, a special focus of the review was the state of the art of bi-temporal change detection. For this a large number of change detection applications exist and different change detection techniques have been used. There is still no conclusion on which method is best suited for a specific application. The problem to be solved, the available data and the environmental factors must be considered when choosing an approach

 

Operational Scenario (OS):