Minutes Projects Activity Participants 1.2 GMES (EEA Subvention) EAGLE Working group meeting Antonio Arozarena (ES), Nuria Valcárcel (ES), Guillermo Villa (ES), Sokol Bezhani (Albania), Geir-Harald Strand (NO), Geoff Smith (UK), Branislav Olah (EEA), Zoran Velickov (Republic of Macedonia), Gerard Hazeu (NL), Gencay Serter (TK), Gergely Maucha (HU), George Buttner (HU), Ana Sousa (EEA), Kolbeinn Arnason (IS), Michael Bock (DE), Hans Dufourmont (EEA), Markus Erhard (EEA), Ales Versic (SI), Charlotte Steinmeier (CH), Tomas Soukup (CZ), Marek Baranowski (PL), Stefan Kleeschulte (ETCLUSI), Andreas Littkopf (ETCLUSI), Stephan Arnold (DE), Stefan Feigenspan (DE), Núria Blanes (ETCLUSI) Date 17 th November 2010 Prepared by: Comments by: Núria Blanes, Stefan Kleeschulte Geir Harald Strand, Geoff Smith, Gerard Hazeu, Gergely Maucha INDEX OF THE MINUTES 1. Review of the discussion of the NRC land cover workshop and pending issues not discussed..1 2. P rogress on new data model...... 2 3. W ork agreed to be done before the next EAGLE meeting......4 4. Feedback on HRL: SWOT and Specifications......4 4.1 Forest HRL......4 4.2 Grasslands HRL...5 4.3 Wetlands HRL...5 4.4 Water HRL... 6 4.5 Imperviousness layer...6 4.6 Change probability layer... 6 5. New inclusions to the EAGLE group......6 6. Annex 1: Extra information to be considered for further discussions...7 1. REVIEW OF THE DISCUSSION OF THE NRC LAND COVER WORKSHOP AND PENDING ISSUES NOT DISCUSSED INSPIRE process and the TWG on Land Cover and on Land Use were mentioned. Several discussions regarding the role that INSPIRE is playing and in parallel, the role that the EAGLE group could play considering the whole scenario. It was mentioned that: - INSPIRE is a vehicle to establish a structure to share spatial data within Europe and find a common ground for the future land monitoring programme in Europe, but is not supposed that INSPIRE will collect new data - A unified and synchronised model is going to be developed, taking into consideration national datasets as well - EAGLE group can influence nowadays the INSPIRE process, although the other way around should wait for a more maturity of INSPIRE itself. It is important to ensure that INSPIRE model is flexible enough to allow future developments or ideas regarding data harmonisation and data collection. - The state-of-the-art of the TWG on Land Cover and the TWG on Land Use is the following: o All the groups started the work in May 2010, reviewing reference materials and use cases. Reference material of CLC and the use case of LEAC have been provided. WkF_EAGLE_Minutes_101220.doc 1/7
o In the case of the TWG on Land Cover: the first version of the European data model is developed and delivered to JRC. It already contains good principles to integrate national activities in the whole process, takes into account CLC, HRL, national datamodels, research activities and LPIS and is developed with the aim of not impeding future land cover monitoring developments. o In the case of the TWG on Land use: explicit land use types are already defined, as well as the basis for a nomenclature that will be applied (but can be expanded) and how LUCAS data will be used. First data specifications and the data model has been delivered to the INSPIRE team. o Work foreseen: At the current moment: internal consultation and review process for horizontal harmonisation, especially to solve cross-themes such as geometries and attribute contents (one dedicated meeting to reach an agreement among all team leaders and facilitators). Continue the work in separated groups to submit the 2 nd version of the models (period to identify other reference materials, other projects and hold new meetings, discussions, etc.) in spring 2011. During summer 2011: testing phase of the model (still to be decided how the testing will be done: could EAGLE be the testing group?). Afterwards, public hearing, where all the comments should be made: encouragement for making concrete suggestions directly to the text, which are easier to integrate. Comments and test results will be integrated to ellaborate the 3 rd version of the model and after that, JRC will take over the task completely. - Discussion regarding the influence of INSPIRE definitions affecting CORINE and / or the HRL: o From the top-down approach, CORINE is not under risk. o In the case of TWG on both Land Cover and Land Use, the main aim was to keep the model as simple as possible for its further use. o In the case of TWG on Land Cover, it is foreseen that the model developed will not influence the mapping activities. Other types of detailed feature information not considered pure land cover (e.g. buildings, roads, ) will be tackled in other INSPIRE groups, ensuring that the connections between the different data models exists. o INSPIRE is a tool for data exchange and for enabling the translation between data models from different countries, it is not supposed to reorganise data at national level, unless the MS for some reason decides to do this. Re ached this point, the group establishes a time frame based on long term and short term activities that could be done by EAGLE: - Short term: CLC2012, as it is a fix objective to be accomplished in 2012. o Proposal to develop mechanisms and tools to assist a quicker production of CLC by the national teams. It is seen as the best exercise that can be done at EU level is the population of CLC polygons with additional data and attributes, which should be comparable throughout all the contries and across Europe (similar to the idea of the HRL at EU level, which will enable an improved analysis of the results of CLC). - Long term: influence on the definition of the HRL o EAGLE group should start right now o Consider GIO budget regarding user uptake: which actions can EAGLE propose? 2. PROGRESS ON NEW DATA MODEL This is considered the real work that should be performed by the EAGLE group. It has not been positive to wait for so long to have the meeting, so it is proposed to develop an action plan for the group, considering the different ongoing activities but independently from other initiatives. The scope of the work of the group has been repeated again: nomenclature, discussion on land cover elements, land cover parameters, objects, future classification systems in order to improve the European land cover datamodel and evaluation of the HRL. WkF_EAGLE_Minutes_101220.doc 2/7
However, there is no time to discuss new nomenclatures, with associated new training courses to understand the different land cover/land use classes, etc. It has been proposed that ES; DE, NL and AT presents the solutions they developed regarding datamodels, summarizing the constraints that have been faced, in order to be able to merge all solutions into a single European data model. Several people presented the work done so far since the meeting held in Lisbon: - Norway (Geir): They presented an exercise to populate CLC polygons in order to understand the contents of the land cover classes. The main conclusion of the whole study is that the definition of the CLC classes is matching very well with the actual content of the polygons in terms of pure land cover types used for this exercise. This respresents then, a strong support for the use of the HR layers to characterise the CLC objects and identify objects that do not fit the pattern; EAGLE should work on setting the limits for the HRL charcateristics. Some comments on the presentation: o Study on the standard deviation between the polygons representing the same CLC class: not done due to lack of budget o Would be interesting to add the percentages of the pure land cover classes into each CLC polygon, but mainly in order to support advanced users that will analyse the data and the results. o By the establishment of thresholds, is it possible to derive other products from the database presented. - Czech Republic (Tomas): The analysis of the composition of the CLC polygons in Czech Republic was presented. The results are very similar to the ones presented in Norway, indicating that CLC mapping is done well. They try to compare also national composition with variation between the different districts (regional scale), where there is more variation due to the tendency of some classes to include all types of characteristics (especially mixed classes): there is an underestimation of the pure classes, but this fact will depend on the heterogeneity of the landscape. Geometry of the objects is also influencing its composition. - ETCLUSI (Gergely) presented his study on scale effects and the analysis of the soil sealing layer, where it is demonstrated that the accuracy of data population increase with the level of aggregation of the high resolution pixel data. These presentations and the ones held in Lisbon demonstrate the good results of the CLC exercise, CLC is practical and it should be discussed how to add usefulness to the product, content, quality, etc. It is important to not loose the historical and background data for comparisons, but to improve the existing information for the analysis performed at EU level. However, the exercise performed by the different national teams using national data is not giving an overall solution; therefore, there exist 2 ways to proceed from now on: 1. Decide a set of fundamental land cover classes (or land cover parameters) with strict definitions at EU level to populate the CLC polygons OR 2. Take over the HRL that are going to be produced and propose modifications (change some of the definitions) in order to transform them into useful information for the population of CLC polygons at European scale. A development of a set of use cases would be a good starting point to perform this activity: proposal to be done at the next EAGLE meeting. DLR (Michael Bock) presented a possible classification of land cover and land use elements organised as a mind map (model reconstruction), as the outcomes of the discussion held in Lisbon. This exercise is preliminary and and generated the following comments: - to list water as a separate element, not inside the abiotic class - use Spanish work to distinguish between attributes, elements and percentages of the CLC class descriptions to include it into the mind map developed - more attributes should be added to the proposed elements of the model: previous work on attribution will be used as input to fulfil some gaps and be able to specify at the end of the description chain, the CLC class. It will be discussed again in the next meeting. All the presentations as well as accompanying documents will be uploaded in the EAGLE webpage (http://etc-lusi.eionet.europa.eu/eagl%20-%20eionet%20group%20lc) WkF_EAGLE_Minutes_101220.doc 3/7
3. WORK AGREED TO BE DONE BEFORE THE NEXT EAGLE MEETING Germany will develop the same exercise as Norway, using CLC2006 and DLM-DE 2009 (but finalisation dates has not been specified). Spain is responsible for the development of the basic datamodel for CORINE, and the work is distributed among the following teams: - Artificial areas: Stefan Kleeschulte and Guillermo Villa - Agricultural areas: Tomas Soukup and Nuria Valcarcel - Forest: Stephan Arnold, Michael Bock and Nuria Valcarcel - Wetlands and water bodies: Stefan Kleeschulte and Stephan Arnold ETC is going to provide the information regarding the collection of attributes related to the basic land cover elements to Michael Bock (beginning of 2011). It has been proposed to produce a land use schema similar to the one developed for land cover, but no volunteers or deadlines for this exercise. Land use concepts can be found in the CLC definitions: their identification, and further revision and improvement, could be the basis for the development of the land use schema. ETC will collect all the information already received in the past and the one that will be provided after this meeting and publish it into the website (open to the general public). It is going to contain, at least (and pending to receive more information from the group before the 15 th of December): - Presentations done in Lisbon by Stefan Kleeschulte (LU), Gerard Hazeu (NL) and Vasco Nunes (PT) - Presentations done in Copenhagen by Tomas Soukup (CZ) and Gergely Maucha (ETCLUSI) - Reports of the exercise developed in Norway, reports of the exercise for UK. Agreement taken: all the necessary information to prepare the subsequent meeting will be distributed to the entire group between 3 to 2 weeks in advance of the meeting date. ETC is going to ask for materials 1 month before the meeting, depending on the agenda, in order to distribute the materials to all participants. Next meeting is going to be scheduled during February, exact dates should be agreed. EAGLE group is going to produce a summary table with the relevant dates by the 17 th of December for: - the TWG: to be provided by Geir and Gerard - dates for GIO: to be checked by Stefan (?) - dates for the next meeting of EAGLE (to be decided) - and internal working dates: depending on the rest of dates (inputs expected by 15 th of December) 4. FEEDBACK ON HRL: SWOT AND SPECIFICATIONS The following (first) list of ideas has been collected at the EAGLE working group meeting in Copenhagen. The users made clear that for most of them, the HR layers are not an end product, but a support tool to populate / characterise land cover objects. For these support layers any accuracy requirements could be used in a bit more flexible manner. 4.1 Forest HRL There was an overall satisfaction with the technical specifications of the product, except for the minimum mapping unit (MMU) applied. The user community expressed a clear requirement of a MMU of 0.5 ha instead of 1 ha. This request has been also mentioned in an expert exchange workshop for the forest HR products in Lugo, September 2010. Perhaps it would be of interest for the future to make a broader consultation with different national agencies that are responsible for this specific reporting needs and the expected benefits of the proposed HRL product with 0,5 ha MMU. The users are aware that this MMU is difficult to achieve with the current EO input data (20m resolution), nevertheless such MMU is requested by international reporting obligations and to be compliant with international forest definitions (FAO, Kyoto, etc.). Knowing the limitation of the input data, the user present in the working group expressed a willingness to accept a higher uncertainty in the data content (i.e. a lower accuracy) compared to the forest patches > 1ha. It would be acceptable to derive the 0.5 ha MMU forest mask from the existing CCD product by aggregating the individual CCD pixels to forest patches > 0.5ha. WkF_EAGLE_Minutes_101220.doc 4/7
Majority agreement by EAGLE: recommend to go to 0,5ha threshold with uncertainty information associated to the layer. Provide the figure on accuracy only at 1ha. Crown cover density product would be used as information to populate CLC polygons. Minor voices (NO) would prefer only pixel level information related to crown/tree coverage. 4.2 Grasslands HRL - A first level separation of arable land and grass areas would be appreciated. Discussed if g2 should concentrate on natural and semi-natual grasslands only. - The grass layer should be ideally consist of a series of high resolution layers that provide a density information at pixel level for the following classes: o Trees o Shrubs (without trees) o Grass (without shrubs) o Bare soil (without grass) - Percentage of grass at pixel level, similar to the information provided by the Crown Cover Density (CCD) layer of the forest HR layer, but ranging from 1 100%. By providing a density layers, the user themself can decide about the extent of a grass mask and the accepted level of mixture with other land cover elements. It should be clarified by g2 the workflow they are following to derive the mask: are they delineating beforehand the grasslands mask and then evaluating what is inside or are they doing it the other way around? - The proposed layers on woody vegetation fraction and bare soil fraction inside a grassland mask are considered a first potential approximation of such density information. It would, however, be more useful to have a complete coverage (independent of land cover type) showing these (and other) fractions - Information about the intensity of use of the grass should be provided. A simple differentiation in three use classes we considered as a starting point (intensive use / intermediate use / low intensity use). - The information on the intensity of use should go together with a stratification of the land, as similar actual uses in different environmental zones can have different impacts and therefore should be looked at in their regional context. - Information about the wetness of the grassland (and also all other lands) would be appreciated (soil moisture information?) - The temporal profile of the woody vegetation fraction and bare soil fraction should be made available, i.e. in case the parameters are derived at different stages of the season, each time step should be made available. EAGLE group decided to ask for a clarification on the workflow for the preparation of the next meeting between EAGLE and g2. It has been agreed that the density of grasslands is very difficult to determine, especially using satellite images and automated processing, but from ortophotos and experts from the areas, there would be more opportunities. Therefore, it is assumed that in the future, other sources of information coming from Agricultural Ministries for example, and in-situ data as LPIS, will be available and usable for this purpose. 4.3 Wetlands HRL Ramsar is the user organisation of this HRL, the product developed have the quality accordingly to th e specifications made by Ramsar, so the product is OK from this point of view. Development of the product is based on all the wetlands identified by the country and then, similar areas are also mapped as wetlands (automatically or visually interpreted): only 30% of the database is based on existing information, the remaining 70% is based on EO. Possible problems: - A lot of agricultural land that would have the same characteristics if it rains. - Definition of what is a wetland and once the definition would be clear and agreed, to delineate the wetland polygon itself. - A set of different land cover classes are present inside each polygon determined as wetland: perhaps it would be interesting to classify the areas that are really wet. EAGLE group decided to ask g2 to develop: WkF_EAGLE_Minutes_101220.doc 5/7
- a wetland density layer - the establishment of a wetland class: to describe what is really a wetland inside the wetland polygon - water regime present in wetland areas 4.4 Water HRL This product is a binary water mask. Density information could be only created if larger pixels would be used. If this is the case, perhaps the most interesting information to be derived is rivers ( streamline data) or small water bodies, because rivers are more or less stable and we know where they are. The need for this layer should be revisited by the EEA the need for this layer, as today there are 2 databases concerning rivers and water bodies that should be harmonised. Several questions concerning the loss of connectivity of the river network, if all the water information is included in the product, and questions on non-permanent lakes and temporary flooded areas were raised by the EAGLE group. 4.5 Imperviousness layer The specifications of this product are based on the Urban Atlas requests. EAGLE group considered the pixel level probable imperviousness product as the more interesting. With respect to derived products, the EAGLE group proposes to add an extra-class from 1-29% of imperviousness to the product, because the area occupied by this class is mainly the urban fringe, which is very much affected for new urban developments and it would be a good indicator to evaluate urban sprawl. 4.6 Change probability layer It is important to define what the group understand as Change probability layer, what has to be done in order to produce it and the added value that can be obtained in order to justify its inclusion in the IP for the CLC update. Some reasons for it: - A layer considering potential changes can guide the photointerpreters to look more carefully to those areas identified. It is a support for the photo interpreter. - The final product (CLC2012) with this intermediate product can be produced faster and with less mistakes: in Norway, they demonstrate that they save approximately 50% of the workhours (relative to the EEA expectation). (Geir is going to send the Norwegian example to the ETC and it will be uploaded into the EAGLE webpage). Proposals: - Develop an example based on Image 2006 and Image 2009 - Develop a change probability layer between Image 2000 and Image 2006. Once done, check how many changes are identified in the change probability layer that are already mapped in the change layer of CLC 2006. Areas where most likely areas of changes can be found could be then masked. - Look for the change detection methods being studied in SATChMo 5. NEW INCLUSIONS TO THE EAGLE GROUP 1- Iceland representative. 2- Switzerland representative (depending on the available resources) Turkey and Republic of Macedonia: they would like to be involved in the distribution list, but for the moment they do not see much room for their contributions. WkF_EAGLE_Minutes_101220.doc 6/7
6. ANNEX 1: EXTRA INFORMATION TO BE CONSIDERED FOR FURTHER DISCUSS IONS Geoland 2 document on User requirements for High Resolution Layers (Draft 1.2) with the objective of working out a series of user requirements for the high resolution layers (HRL) in general and the high resolution layers on grass-covered surfaces in particular, which can be used to derive technical specifications for the production of the same layer. WkF_EAGLE_Minutes_101220.doc 7/7