International Earth Observation Initiatives and Programs: the Context for Global Urban Mapping

Besides the dominant focus of urban remote sensing research on local and regional scales, the URS2005 conference offers a special session on “Global Observation of Urban Areas”. This session was jointly initiated by the GOFC-GOLD (Global observations of forest and land cover) emphasizing that coordinated, consistent, and operational urban mapping and monitoring has to consider the evolving efforts in international coordination and cooperation for land observations at global scales. Recent developments again emphasize the need for sustained, harmonized, and validated earth observation products, i.e. in UNCED’s Agenda 21, UNFCCC and the Kyoto protocol, the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg 2002 and the related Group of Earth Observations (GEO) formed in 2003 that has evolved to a Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), the European Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) initiative, as well as, the GCOS implementation plan calling on land cover. These developments aim at long term goals but have to start and evolve from an international cooperation and consensus building efforts, both in on the strategic level and in implementation activities. These developments will set the frame for global urban observations with its main focus on continuity and consistency in earth observations that best fits user requirements.