Users in the public administrations or private organizations using EO to assist environmental or climate change impact policy making decisions i.e, assisting in developing monitoring to evaluate and deliver policy goals, provide assessment of ecosystems, rapid response to major environmental risk events, or those associated health security & care events. These users are largely related with international treaties and hence a strong international collaboration. EO/GI becomes a key data and information to support Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) in particular in terms of environmental, climate and health towards SDG 11, SDG 13 Climate Action; SDG 14 Life Below Water; or SDG 15 Life on Land.
EO/GI users in meteo and climate; use of satellite-based observations in addressing key climate science questions for user-centric climate change risk assessment applications or climate-related issues
EO provides timely, continuous and independent data for monitoring indicators of the progress of the society in various societal challenges.
EO monitoring supports activities that address societal & environmental challenges. This happens indirectly along a chain: e.g. a regularly provided EO information product derived from EO data of a satellite is integrated as a parameter in a climate model / Earth system model. This climate model enables the development of regulations (and their enforcement through constant monitoring) to implement climate change mitigation measures. Thereby, the chain is characterized by seveal connected nodes: from societal challenges to use cases of users to EO applications to EO products to specific satellites and their sensors.
[Communities that promote collaboration among diverse stakeholders from academia, industry, public administration as well as local residents]
Scientific agendas address societal challenges and the EO/GI community can contribute to them. Consortia usually include experts from academia (researchers, developers, scientists), EO companies, and members from the user community such as public authorities.
Biodiversity describes the variety of ecosystems (natural capital), species and genes in the world or in a particular habitat. Ecosystem services sustain our economies and societies and are essential to human wellbeing.
EO is used to monitor land ecosystems and biodiversity, environmental impact of human activities, land pollution and vegetation encroachment. A tool for this is land cover mapping and mapping of land cover change about a wide set of categories, lincuding basic forest types, major agricultural surface types, conservation areas, settlements, infrastructure, primary roads, bare soil, water bodies, rivers, wetlands following standard classification schemes according to CORINE or FAO LCCS. Main source are optical EO data and associated pixel-based and object-based image classification methods. For discriminating vegetation classes, they often making use of various vegetation indices and biophysical parameters.