Land use & land cover mapping in Europe: Current practice, trends and future. Examples from national approaches: LISA–the Austrian approach.

The project Land Information System Austria (LISA) demonstrates the feasibility of an Austrian-wide homogeneous land cover and land use monitoring solution. State of the art technologies in remote sensing and GIS combined with the effective integration of national spatial data infrastructure (orthophotos, airborne laser scanning data and other countrywide available geodata) are used in combination with European GMES/Copernicus data infrastructure to meet the requirements of a modern land monitoring system, specified by governmental institutions on state, provincial and municipality level. The conceptual basis consists of an object oriented data model that covers the two main land monitoring issues separately: land cover and land use. Whereas land cover is derived solely based on remote sensing data, the land use data are assessed as synoptic view from various thematic databases (spatial zoning plans, IACS, nature conservation, road network etc.) and land cover classifications. The applied technical approach is the result of various research activities. Currently, the countrywide realization of LISA in form of an administrative national collaboration across various hierarchical administration levels (regional and national) as well as across various thematic contributions (cadastral mapping, spatial planning, agriculture, etc.) is discussed.