Geographic Information and Earth Observation technologies are relevant areas of development in European policies towards a sustainable management of the land and the environment. The main advantages of these technologies are a shared standardized knowledge and a more efficient tool supporting decisions.

The users are Public Administrations at local, regional and national level and private entities, which use the E.O. land products in several application fields, such as urban planning, Geographic Information Systems, environmental and pollution monitoring, green areas monitoring and urban audit projects.

Planetek Italia in years has continuously hold relationships with national and European governmental and non-governmental organizations, research institutes and private companies by jointly working in international programmes in this field area.

The GSE Land program (2005-2008) was an European Space Agency (ESA) funded project. The Objective of the GSE Land program was to provide regularly updated core land cover / land use maps at European, national / regional and local level.

GSE Land joined the three ESA GSE projects that had already worked on land applications in the first GSE stage:

• SAGE: water pollution, water abstraction, agro-environmental indicators and soil sealing indicators;
• GMES Urban Services (GUS): urban mapping and monitoring services;
• CoastWatch (land part): integrated coastal zone management.

By integrating such information into existing infrastructure, models and management tools, international and national public entities have been enabled to fulfil their increasing reporting and management obligations in an improved way.

The GSE Land services portfolio is organized in 2 product lines: the mapping services and downstream services. Mapping services were designed to provide map products at different scales (urban, regional) and with different techniques.

Starting from mapping services as input data, downstream services were designed to provide additional information, such as soil sealing indexes or soil exploitation/use, etc.

Planetek Italia operated in the GSE Land program as provider of Earth Observation derived value added product, as Land Use Maps for urban areas. The product developed and provided is Urban Atlas, a Land Use Map with CORINE Land Cover legend. The level of detail of GSE Land Product Map is 4 for artificial surfaces and 2 for the natural ones.

The aim of this product was to provide to Local Authorities an European approved tool to monitor, manage and plan urban areas. The extracted information can be used to show possible environmental inconvenience, excessive territory exploitation and some parameters related to life quality.

Planetek Italia provided the GSE Land Product Map to Naples and Città del Fare (municipality area and north eastern area); Patto del Nord Barese (northen area of Bari); Oristano (province of); Venice, Padova, Rovigo, Treviso; Belluno; Verona, Vicenza, Catania; Patto del Calatino and Thessaloniki (Greek municipality area).