Services that monitor land cover all services/applications that are focused on monitoring, assessing, managing, planning and improving land areas, its ecosystems (land, soil and inland water monitoring/quality/availability & usage assessments) and evolution of the land surface (use, cover, seasonal and annual changes and monitors variables) even if it involves human intervention (environmental challenges, impact evaluation or suitability analysis).
Monitoring is possible by deriving information from variables measured by EO in different domains, like vegetation, energy, water, and cryosphere. For vegetation, those variables are for example land cover, NDVI, burnt area, or surface soil moisture. In the energy domain, land surface temperature and surface albedo are known variables, for water it is water surface temperature or water quality. Finally, for the cryosphere lake ice and snow cover extent, and snow water equivalent are variables that are used for land monitoring services.
To monitor crops and agriculture with EO-based methods is relevant for various applications, including to assess environmental impact of farming, assess crop damage due to storms, to detect ollegal or undesired crops, to monitor water use on crops and horticulture, and to monitor land degradation neutrality. EO mapping of crops happens on all scales with both optical and SAR sensors. Relevant EO products include degradation, agri-environment, ecosystem, damage estimation, warning-service, food-security, impact, crop health (disease and stress), leaf area index, crop acreage and yield harvest (inventories / statistics), crop types (extent, growth, health, stress), land surface temperature, illicit crops, estimates, cultivation patterns, soil water index, surface soil moisture, run-off, land cover (land cover change), land productivity (net primary productivity, NPP), carbon stocks (soil organic carbon, SOC).