Building saliency, legitimacy, and credibility towards operational global and regional land cover observations and assessments

摘要

Issues of global, regional and national forest and land cover observations have recently received significant attention in a number of international processes on the political level, offering opportunities to improving relevance, acceptance, and approaches to operationalize global and regional land cover assessments. Since technological progress and methodological sophistication is often not sufficient to implement global land assessments effectively, the presentation puts particular emphasize on fostering more saliency and legitimacy of land cover observations in addition to technical credibility. The efforts described are structured, both conceptually and methodologically, to build a bridge between policy requirements, and scientific progress and consensus. It involves engagement with prominent political processes, the gathering of observation requirements, providing technical policy advice, the definition of observation strategies and priorities, evolving international technical consensus on critical issues, the specification of implementation guidelines, and implementation of dedicated case studies fostering technical progress, operations and applications. These activities are progressing in four major thematic areas: (a) standards for land cover characterization, (b) standards methods for land cover accuracy assessment, (c) global land cover observations and applications and (d) land cover change monitoring. As specific examples, activities will be presented to evolve land cover observations as part of GEOSS (global land cover task DA-07-02) and to support the UNFCCC efforts for research and systematic observations of Essential CUmate Variables (ECV's).