News

The European Space Agency (ESA) hereby invites all companies from DUE participating countries to submit a tender for the GLOBCOVER procurement. If companies are not yet registered as an ESA bidder, they are invited to obtain access to EMITS by completing a questionnaire, which can be found at the indicated URL, section Registration Request.

The objective of the GLOBCOVER initiative is develop and demonstrate a service that in first instance will produce a global land-cover map for the year 2005, using as main source of data the fine resolution (300m) mode data from MERIS sensor on-board ENVISAT satellite to be acquired over the full year 2005.
The thematic legend of the final product is intended to be compatible with the FAO Land Cover Classification System (LCCS). The service will be developed in a way that any further update of the Global Land Cover map will be at recurrent cost to run the developed system.
This new product is intended to update and to complement the other existing comparable global products, such as the global land cover map at 1 km resolution for the year 2000 (GLC-2000) produced by the JRC. It is also expected to improve such previous global products, in particular through a finer resolution (300m).

The initiative includes a validation phase similar to the GLC-2000 validation exercise.Appropriate ap-proaches for the validation of the land cover products are planned to be defined in con-sultation with CEOS.

The GLOBCOVER initiative is leaded by an international network of partners, in particular, JRC, FAO, UNEP, IGBP and GOFC are considered as the GLOBCOVER partners.