CopGruen

Permanent grassland provides numerous ecosystem services, such as high biodiversity, buffering effect for nutrients and water, and function as a carbon sink. However, grassland is under severe pressure due to land consumption and intensification of use. For this reason, environmental, nature conservation, agricultural and climate policy measures have been defined at municipal, national and EU level. Implementation and documentation are the responsibility of the state environmental agencies.

Many of these monitoring tasks must be carried out over large areas and in recurring cycles. These include, for example, the survey and change analysis of protected biotopes and habitat types as well as a conservation status assessment of habitat types in Flora-Fauna-Habitat Directive areas. However, there are no standardized, low-threshold tools for a transnational implementation of such a landscape-based, remote sensing area monitoring.

Therefore, the aim of the Environmental Lighthouse Project CopGrün is to develop, validate and provide optimized remote sensing-based methods or services for official grassland monitoring in Germany. More than a dozen openland habitat types along a moisture gradient are considered, ranging from bogs, brown sedge swamps and wet heaths to mowed or grazed wet grassland and grassland of medium sites to dry and rough grasslands and dry heaths.

With a pragmatic and practical focus of the project on the monitoring needs of state environmental agencies, the goal is to bring together previous and ongoing Copernicus activities and follow them up in a common framework. The customized services for the state environmental agencies are to be realized with a usage-oriented user interface based on a web application in the environment of the national CODE-DE platform in the sense of cloud computing.

Within the project, the TU Berlin is responsible for the processing of different remote sensing indicators for the detection of conditions, stresses and changes of vegetation. Algorithm development and programming of processing sequences are also part of our tasks.