FACT AlpsLand

This project aims at preparing a new classification of land cover over the European Alps as defined by the Alpine Convention. During the project main activities aim at finding the best available training data based on a mixture of existing mapping products and in situ observations like e.g., the LUCAS dataset, defining the best features based on satellite data and train models of state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms. During the AI4EBV project an operational processing chain for a specific legend of ecosystems has been developed and run in the Microsoft Azure cloud. This technology will now be deployed also in the Eurac processing cluster and applied on the archive of Sentinel imagery available in Eurac. In the ECO4Alps project further a processing chain has been applied for covering mostly the eastern alps. This project now aims at creating a final map at annual interval for the complete European Alps.

-    Financing program: Focus Activity
-    Objectives + planned Achievements (Output): Provide annual land cover maps for the full alps from 2016 and onwards. Publish the methodology as a peer reviewed paper and publish the maps as open data.

Strategically this demonstrate that Eurac is able to carry out high resolution mapping activities a large area scale and supports research activities in many other projects, where accurate land cover mapping outside of our local regions is often missing. This further shows our role as a competence centre for the whole alps and complements activities like the Sentinel Alpine Observatory in past years and the recent Alpine Drought Observatory.

contact person: Alexander Jacob alexander.jacob@eurac.edu, Ruth Sonnenschein ruth.sonnenschein@eurac.edu