Land cover is the material that covers the Earth's surface, such as vegetation and water. Satellites can be used to monitor how this land cover is being used and detect changes to the land over time.
- Sentinel-1's SAR mission supports land cover classification and change detection mapping
- Sentinel-2's MSI instrument supports land monitoring services
and
- On-board Sentinel-3, the:
- Altimetry instrument supports land applications such as river and lake monitoring, geodesy studies, and snow & ice measurement and monitoring
- OLCI optical instrument provides support to land monitoring as well as precision farming and desertfication monitoring