In: Wagner W., Székely, B. (eds.): ISPRS TC VII Symposium - 100 Years ISPRS, Vienna, Austria, July 5-7, 2010, IAPRS, Voi. XXXVIII, Part 7B 
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GEOLAND2 - TOWARDS AN OPERATIONAL GMES LAND MONITORING CORE 
SERVICE; FIRST RESULTS OF THE BIOGEOPHYSICAL PARAMETER CORE 
MAPPING SERVICE 
Roselyne Lacaze a , Gianpaolo Balsamo 13 , Frédéric Baret 0 , Andrew Bradley d , Jean-Christophe Calvet 6 , Fernando Camacho f , Raphael 
D’Andrimont 8 , Sandra C. Freitas 11 , Hassan Makhmara 1 , Vahid Naeimi J , Philippe Pacholczyk k , Hervé Poilvé 1 , Bruno Smets m , Kevin 
Tansey d , Isabel F. Trigo h , Wolfgang Wagner 1 , Marie Weiss c 
a HYGEOS, Cesbio Bpi 2108,18 avenue E. Belin, 31401 Toulouse Cedex 9, France - rl@hygeos.com 
b ECMWF, Shinfield Park, Reading, Berks, United Kingdom - balsamo@ecmwf.int 
c INRA, EMMAH UMR1114, site Agroparc, 84914 Avignon, France - (baret, weiss)@avi gnon, inra.fr 
d University of Leicester, LE1 7RH, Leicester, United Kingdom - (kevin.tansey, avb4 )@.le.ac.uk 
e CNRM/Météo-France, 42 avenue G. Coriolis, 31057 Toulouse Cedex, France - calvet@meteo.fr 
f EOLAB, G.V. Marques del Turia, 20-9, 46 005 Valencia, Spain - camacho@eolab.es 
8 Université Catholique de Louvain, 2 Croix du sud, B1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium - dandrimont@uclouvain.be 
h IM Portugal, Rua Cao Aeroporto de Lisboa, 1749-077 Lisboa, Portugal - (sandra.coelho, isabel.trigo)@meteo.pt 
1 CNES, 18 av. E. Belin, 31 401 Toulouse Cedex, France- (hassan.makhmara, philippe.pacholczyk)@cnes.fr 
J TU Wien, Gusshausstrass 27-29/122, 1040 Vienna, Austria - (vn, ww)@ipf.tuwien.ac.at 
1 Infoterra France, 15 avenue de l’Europe, 31 522 Ramonville Ste-Agne, France - herve.poilve@infoterra.fr 
m VITO, Boeretang 200, 2400 Mol, Belgium - Bruno.smets@vito.be 
KEY WORDS: Environment, Monitoring, Land, Parameters, Real-time, Services, Production, Global 
ABSTRACT: 
The European GMES initiative provides a political framework for future implementations of Services Centres related to 
environmental applications. The FP7/geoland2 project is the last brick towards the implementation of fully mature GMES Land 
Services, consisting of Core Mapping Services (CMS) and Core Information Services (CIS). Its goal is to build, validate and 
demonstrate operational processing lines and products on a user-driven basis. The CMS produce “basic” geo-information on the land 
state covering a wide variety of thematic content, spatial scales from local to global, and update frequency from sub-daily to several 
years. Besides being a valuable information source by their own, the “basic” products are input for the Core Information Services 
focusing on a broad variety of thematic fields, like water quality, forest management, spatial planning, agri-environmental issues, 
carbon cycle analysis, supporting the European environmental policies and international treaties on climate change, food security, 
and sustainable development. The Bio-geophysical Parameter (BioPar) CMS aims at setting-up operational infrastructures for 
providing regional, continental, and global variables describing the vegetation state, the radiation budget at the surface, and the water 
cycle, both in near real time and off-line mode. The concept, the objectives, and the structure of geoland2, and of the BioPar CMS, 
in the European GMES context are introduced. The research, development, production, and validation activities of the BioPar CMS 
are presented with a special focus on the first biophysical products available to the institutional users, and to the scientific 
community. 
1. INTRODUCTION 
With the ongoing climate change, the pressure on nature, 
biodiversity and our own living conditions increases steadily. 
To mitigate these trends by effective adaptation strategies and 
counter measures a frequent and area-wide monitoring of the 
environment is crucial to provide decision makers with 
accurate, up-to-date and reliable information on the changing 
conditions of our natural resources. 
Within the GMES initiative (Global Monitoring of Environment 
and Security), led by the European Union (EU) and the 
European Space Agency (ESA), the Land Services provide 
cross-border harmonized geo-information at global to local 
scales in a time- and cost-effective manner. Building upon their 
results of a series of projects funded by the EU (geoland, 
Boss4Gmes, Cyclopes, VGT4Africa) and the ESA (GSE Land, 
GSE Forest Monitoring, DUE Globcarbon, DUE Globcover), 
geoland2 aims to organise a qualified production network, to 
build, validate and demonstrate operational processing lines and 
to set-up a user driven product quality assurance process, to 
guarantee that the products meet the actual user requirements. 
2. GEOLAND2 
Geoland2 is a project of the 7 th Framework Program which 
intends to constitute a major step forward in the implementation 
of the GMES Land Monitoring Core Service (LMCS). It 
addresses the three components (local, continental, global) of 
the LMCS. 
The goal of geoland2 is: 
• to prepare, validate and demonstrate pre-operational 
service chains and products that will underpin the 
LMCS 
• to propose and demonstrate a concrete functional 
organisation of the LMCS