Land Use Land Cover

Local land use and land cover changes are fundamental agents of global climate change and are significant forces that impact biodiversity, water and radiation budgets, trace gas emissions, and ultimately, climate at all scales. The Land Use/Land Cover service implementation generates both LULC and LULC changes maps which will answer the requirements specified in the latest AGTE recommendations, namely for generating the “Trends in Land Structure” indicator. The processing chain is implemented in GRASS GIS orchestrated by Python/Shell scripting and is divided in two major blocks:

• The LULC Block is a supporting process chain for the following block within the service but also a reusable block to generate data for other services. Landsat images will be processed to automatically generate the LULC maps both in raster and vector data formats. The maps will have a MMU of 5ha and will be described with a FAO- based nomenclature of 11 classes.
• Land Cover changes can be mapped recurring to different techniques [10], but the main challenge is the interpretation of the resulting maps and the conversion into understandable desertification indicators. The Change analysis block implements the changes in LULC and a possible approach to the indicator “Trends in land cover structure”.