Research

The general objective of the project is to create a toolbox for monitoring and scoping land-use and management related EU policies (specifically agricultural, forestry, land, and climate-related policies) and its mid- to long-term environmental and economic impacts. The specific objective is to boost forward-looking land-use and management simulation models in their capacity to formulate, implement and monitor future policies. This will be achieved by vastly improving bottom-up linkages across various scales (farm/regional/country/global), the spatial resolution, as well as temporal dynamics. The LAMASUS proposal will be submitted in response to the call HORIZON CL6 2021 GOVERNANCE 01-13: Modelling land use and land management in the context of climate change.

The long-term goal of “Enhancing drought monitoring with hyperspectral narrowbands” (Hereafter referred to as HyRELIEF) is to build the resilience of smallholder farmers and pastoralists in arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs) in Africa to droughts through enhanced geospatial information services. Droughts in ASALs in Africa have devastating impacts on the regional food supply/demand equilibrium. The recent 2016-2017 Horn of Africa drought left 2 million people in need of food aid in Kenya alone and caused the price of maize (the country’s main staple grain) to surge by one third (WFP, 2017). HyRELIEF aims to increase the reliability and useabilitayof the ecostress instrument on the ISS drought monitoring products in Kenya with HNB satellite image data and co-produvtion, respectively.

Based on the feasibility study "SeMoNa22", we investigate in the present project the transferability of the findings of SeMoNa22 to other areas, the integration into operational monitoring as well as the enlargement of the user group. SeMoNa22 aimed to investigate different remote sensing data from the earth observation satellites Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 with high-resolution public geodata for a regular, traceable, and validatable monitoring of green spaces (green infrastructure) and their biotope types in urban environments. In detail, it was investigated to what extent the biotope mapping, as well as the green space monitoring of the City of Vienna (Vienna Environmental Protection Department - MA 22), can be supported in the future with the help of remote sensing data. The SeMoNa22 feasibility study has shown that the combination of high spatial resolution data (airborne laser scanning data, image matching data) with high temporal resolution data from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 has a high potential for the mentioned applications, but that additional research is needed about the large-scale roll-out, the transfer to areas with a poorer data basis than in Vienna, and the repeatability of the analyses in the context of operational monitoring. The goals of "Semona Reloaded" are derived from this. It is planned to extend the habitat classification to the entire Vienna Woods and the Danube Floodplain National Park. This will also ensure a better reference data basis for rare habitat types. In addition, it is planned to extend the analyses to areas outside Vienna (e.g. Wachau, Krems) to investigate the influence of different reference databases. In the course of this extension, the Danube University will be included as an additional project partner, which has built up extensive know-how in the fields of biodiversity research and ecosystem services in recent years and operates a "living lab" on this topic in the Wachau. The suitability of the results of Semona Reloaded as a basis for the evaluation of ecosystem services will be investigated. To integrate the expected results of Semona Reloaded into operational monitoring systems, contacts with the City of Vienna and the Province of Lower Austria will be intensified. Likewise, the connection with other Austrian projects (e.g. SIMS) on this topic will be strengthened in the framework of workshops.