From Monday to Wednesday this week (23-25 April 2018), experts from the Ministry of Environment Protection and Agriculture of Georgia and a number of other national organisations are discussing and learning the European methodology to map land cover and land use changes.

Corine Land Cover (CLC) datasets have provided a time series of land cover and land use information over the European continent since 1990. These datasets allow for the monitoring of changes to the earth’s surface that result from the interaction of both natural processes and human activities.

Georgian experts are learning to apply the CLC methodology to a pilot area under the EU-funded project “Implementation of the Shared Environmental Information System principles and practices in the Eastern Partnership countries” (the ENI SEIS II East project). The objective of the training is to support the production of a CLC status dataset by computer-assisted photo-interpretation of satellite images and reference data. The training included a field trip to recognise areas which were difficult to identify on the satellite image and send photos of ground trothing

The work in Georgia is run in parallel with the 2018 update of the CLC layers in the 39 member and cooperating countries of the European Environment Agency (EEA). The training is led by experts from the European Topic Centre on Urban, Land and Soil systems (ETC/ULS) in partnership with the Copernicus Programme, a joint European Union and European Space Agency initiative for a long-term sustainable capacity building in Earth Observation from space.

 Training materials and photos