With its frequent and systematic coverage, SENTINEL-2 will make a significant contribution to land monitoring services by providing input data for both land cover and land cover change mapping, and support the assessment of biogeophysical parameters such as Leaf Area Index (LAI), Leaf Chlorophyll Content (LCC) and Leaf Cover (LC).
SENTINEL-2 links to Copernicus programmes
The Copernicus Land Monitoring service became operational in 2012. The object of the service is to provide land cover information to Users working in the field of environmental and other terrestrial applications. The service is designed to provide geographical information on land cover and related variables such as the vegetation state or the water cycle, and also supports applications in other domains including spatial planning, forest management, water management, agriculture and food security.
The service consists of three main components:
- pan-European
- global
- local
Coordination of the pan-European component is the responsibility of the European Environment Agency (EEA) and the first component, pan-European land cover, will produce five high resolution data sets describing the main land cover types:
- artificial surfaces (such as roads and paved areas)
- forest areas
- agricultural areas (such as grasslands)
- wetlands
- small water bodies
These five datasets were provided by the GIO land project that ran from 2011 to 2015.
The Global component is coordinated by the Joint Research Centre (JRC), a Directorate-General of the European Commission. This component will produce data across a wide range of biophysical variables at a global scale (i.e. worldwide), which will include the description of the state of vegetation (using parameters such as LAI).
The biophysical variable data is provided by the Copernicus Global Land Service (CGLS).
The local component is coordinated by the European Environment Agency and aims to provide more specific and detailed information that will complement the information obtained via the Pan-European component. Besides an update of the Urban Atlas, the next local component will address biodiversity in areas around rivers.