POSSIBILITIES AND LIMITATIONS OF GRASSLAND 
MAPPING WITH GLOBAL POSITIONING SYSTEMS (GPS) 
A. Seifert 
U.I. Six 
St. I Pausch 
H. Teller 
W. Leipnitz 
ABSTRACT 
During the past few years a large change in agricultural landuse has occurred in East Germany. 
Closure of areas of arable land or commercial use are two examples with a big impact on 
vegetation structure or variety of existing biotops. What to be need are location- and region- 
depended concepts for optimal ecological and economical landuse. 
For the agriculture a switch from former intensive landuse now to extensive methods is the only 
way to maintain or promote valuable biotops and to get financial support for the farmers. 
To develop and carry out such ecological friendly and payable concepts we need geo-referenced 
information about landuse, distribution of biotop types, location of endangered plants, etc.. But 
not only a description of the current situation in the field is necessary, but also the documentation 
of effects and changing in time. Because of this extreme time-consuming process to build up a 
digital database we try to use the modem GPS-technology for the two tasks: 
-data capturing 
-continuous data update and map revision 
In this paper we discuss abilities and limitations of GPS-applications in the data gathering process, 
especially with emphasis of concrete realization and co-operation with regional authorities. 
1. Large-area data gathering with GPS 
In this chapter we are concentrated on data capturing for a complete and relative large area (> 
10 km2) of vegetation types or other objects in the countryside with GPS. The main topics are: 
- how to organize and automatize data gathering in the field 
- data integration into a Geographic Information System (GIS) 
- spatial join with parcel boundaries 
This map overlay plays a central role, because financial support for extensive landuse is based on 
the concrete area of an involved or the piece of a partly involved parcel. 
- comparison to image processing with CIR aerial pictures (costs, accuracies, limitations, 
requirements) 
- integration of decision support to infer evaluations and recommendations for landuse planning