Linda See presents high-resolution spatial map on grassland management at conference

13 May 2024

Linda See, a LAMASUS researcher from International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) presented her work on “improving high-resolution spatial information on grassland management by integrating remotely sensed products with statistical and in situ data” at the EO for Agriculture under Pressure 2024 Workshop.

There is currently a lack of high-resolution pan-European information on land use management, especially in terms of how intensively and extensively grasslands are managed. This type of information is needed for economic land use modelling and for assessing policy impacts, such as the latest reforms from the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and other European Union Green Deal targets.

Linda See presented the results of a grassland management map for Europe that uses the Copernicus Corine land cover for 2018 as the basis for allocating grazing livestock (obtained from statistical sources and informed by expert knowledge on national grazing) to relevant land cover types. Using different densities of livestock (calculated from statistical sources), LAMASUS researchers used a rule-based system to map ten grassland management types to the Corine land cover map at a resolution of 100 m. These include classes such as high-, moderate- and low-density pasture systems, high-, moderate- and low-density managed grassland systems, rough grazing, silva-pastural agroforestry, and managed and unmanaged semi-natural systems. The map is currently being validated using experts as well as remotely sensing products such as the frequency of mowing events, which are currently available for individual countries such as Germany. Once the Copernicus very high-resolution layer on grassland mowing event data becomes available in the latter half of 2024, these grassland management classes will be further refined using this pan-European data set.

The dataset can be found here