Week 2 - Land use and land cover

In this video, you heard from Inian at IIASA who spoke about how some of the WeObserve citizen observatories are monitoring land use and land cover.

Land cover refers to the type of surface that covers an area of land, for example: vegetation, water bodies or urban areas. Land use is how we describe the current function of an area of land, which could have an agricultural, recreation or residential function, for example.

Inian told us about how LandSense combines satellite data with citizen science, using the information collected by people on the ground to verify satellite imagery with Natura Alert. We’ll hear more about this project in an forthcoming spotlight step.

We also heard about the GROW Observatory and how this project used sensors to monitor land use through soil moisture, using specific approaches to capture the right information.