This workshop aims at sharing participants knowledge and experience around the usage, design, production and maintenance of land use/land cover products in order to fulfill user requirements and legal obligations (such as INSPIRE), as well as presenting ongoing research that may benefit to these processes.

Describing land, through its physical properties and functional characteristics, to support decision from local to global level, in particular to observe land evolution through time, at a sustainable cost for society is a domain with many challenges and opportunities. Different approaches have been developed in this domain at the operational level or in innovation projects prototypes.

Typically, many existing products merge Land Cover and existing Land Use information whereas in the INSPIRE directive, Land Cover and Land Use are in two separate themes.

On the one hand, the legal context and the new technical opportunities may push data producers to design new land cover and land use products. On the other hand, land cover and land use data are often used to compute evolution indicators, which requires persistent or at least comparable specifications; therefore users may be reluctant to changes in data specification or at least, they will require help to migrate from their usual product to a new one.

The workshop aims at helping data producers for decision making regarding evolution of their land cover and land use data products and at identifying possible actions between involved stakeholders in order to solve issues and to foster innovation in LU/LC products.

The list of questions addressed during this seminar:

• How to model these pieces of information and where are the tradeoffs? Do we need different products for different usages?

• How to manage temporal aspects, e.g. how to ensure computation of meaningful environmental evolution indicators in case of new data specifications as well as back in time?

• How much is the legal context impacting the availability and interoperability of new land cover and land use products?

• What about the articulation between national or even local products and the pan-European ones?

• How much are new sensing capacities –e.g. : high resolution satellite imagery, sensor networks, unmanned aerial vehicles, VGI- an opportunity to derive new information or to lower costs?

• Does this domain require new GIS software capacities : handling multiple levels of details, several classifications, patchwork products?

The provisionary program includes: general presentations and reminders about LU-LC in INSPIRE, about Copernicus and about UN-GGIM, use cases and characteristics of existing European products (from EEA, Eurostat, Eurogeographics, JRC), national experiences (France, Germany, Finland, Spain, Austria).

Organisers: Dominique Laurent (Eurogeographics, IGN, France), Stefan Jensen (EEA), Bénédicte Bucher (EuroSDR, IGN, France, benedicte.bucher@ign.fr)