green areas with a large proportion of free-standing timber
can be more effectively appraised even at this early stage,
thus reducing the need for field studies and enabling those
surveys that are necessary to be conducted in a more tar-
geted manner. IRS data make for a far more finely structur-
ed interpretation than ATKIS, this being of particular value
for landscape planning and ecology. Good interpretation of
large trees and their state of health is possible, for instance,
and shrubbery along tracks can be discerned along with
crop boundaries and field alterations.
The landscape structure approach has the primary aim of
identifying and conditioning a landscape's equipment status
for regional and municipal development planning and, buil-
ding on this, of developing equipment concepts. The varia-
bles to be captured primarily relate to the breaking-up and
desettlement of natural and near-natural landscape units
and to diminutions of their surface shares. To a substantial
extent, this touches on alterations in the mix of intensively
used landscape areas and near-natural elements.
The task here is to select ecological parameters that define
landscape structure and to assess their applicability to data
sourced by remote sensing. Their value as indicators for
functional interconnections in the landscape economy is to
be established by blending them with further ecological
pronouncements relating to landscapes.
The extrapolation of structural parameters from satellite
data is generally preceded by a vegetation and land-use
classification phase. On the strength of this, statistical para-
meters such as circumference/surface ratio, length of ver-
ges, diversity measurements etc. can be calculated for the
individual landscape elements or utilisation classes. In
panchromatic shots, linear elements and utilisation bounda-
ries give rise to characteristic grey scale value differences
that can be intensified and extracted using sharp cut-off
filters. This enables structural parameters such as the crop
sizes for agriculturally used land to be established.
6. CONCLUSION AND OUTLOOK
IRS-1C data constitute superb tools for the spheres of re-
gional planning, urban planning, environmental protection,
agricultural monitoring, forestry and telecommunications
planning. The area of application of the data could be con-
siderably extended, in the authors' opinion, if the data were
suitably refined and data distribution further improved, an
opinion arrived at after numerous conversations with would-
be data users who again and again showed great interest
in the data but who expressed unfamiliarity with data procu-
rement and evaluation routines and rated them as being
unstraightforward. It must also be assumed that the ap-
plication potential of the data is far from having been fully
tapped. With science having "given a lead" on conceivable
applications, it is now imperative that the new data be got
across to the end-user and that their usefulness be further
scrutinised in direct interfaces with day-to-day tasks of plan-
ning and environmental agencies and the like.
The following wishes are expressed by would-be image
users:
- flexibilisation of area purchasable (option of only pur-
chasing area of direct interest and not full or quarter sce-
nes)
- rectification with high accuracy
- image composites in natural colours and colour infrared
representations
- relief models
- monitoring on a range of issues
Besides a tighter definition of areas of application, of parti-
cular importance for the future would appear to be the que-
stion of how data are to be integrated into the basic data
inventories of the various departments. Though it has been
a painfully slow process, it can now be taken as read that,
in Germany, the planning and environmental agencies are
increasingly being fitted out with leading-edge information
and communications technology. Digital geographical base
data in the form of topographical information (ATKIS), ad-
ministrative geometrical data (e.g. municipal block map),
and specialist data (biotope mapping, urban structure ty-
pes, etc.) are increasingly available and, in conjunction with
the dissemination of geoinformation systems, provide an
ideal spring-board for the deployment of high-resolution
remote sensing data in the period ahead.
It only remains to be seen who will be best placed to pro-
cess the data in the most suitable fashion - the satellite
image distributor, a service provider, or the end-user. Of
course, the answer will be very strongly influenced by the
nature of specific applications and the degree of data re-
finement required. The most sensible approach would ap-
pear to involve preprocessing by the satellite image dis-
tributor (georeferencing, image merging), classifications
and across-the-board interpretations by the service provi-
der, and integration of data including evaluation in con-
junction with the entire data inventory by the end-user.
Bibliography
Euromap, 1996. Internal study paper with information on
the IRS-1C program, Neustrelitz.
Jürgens, C., 1996. ‘Neue Erdbeobachtungs-Satelliten lie-
fern hochauflösende Bilddaten für GIS-Anwendungen', GIS
6/1996, Wichmann Verlag, Karlsruhe.
Kramer, H. J., 1996. Observation of the Earth and its Envi-
ronment, Deutsches Fernerkundungsdatenzentrum, Sprin-
ger-Verlag, Berlin.
Meinel, G.; Lippold, R.; Netzband, M., 1998. 'Nutzungs-
móglichkeiten neuer hochauflósender Satellitenbilddaten
für die Raumplanung', conference record of Computerge-
stützte Raumplanung (CORP) '98, Vienna 2/98, pp.121-
128.
256 Intemational Archives of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. Vol. XXXII, Part 7, Budapest, 1998
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