The interdisciplinary research project CRC TR32: “Patterns in Soil-Vegetation-Atmosphere-Systems: Monitoring, Modelling and Data Assimilation” works on matter fluxes between soil, vegetation and atmosphere (SVA) on a regional scale. In this regard, high quality land use data is a strongly demanded spatial information. The study area of the CRC TR32, the catchment of the river Rur, is situated in western Germany, parts of the Netherlands and Belgium. Due to the huge amount of annually changing cultivated land in the area of investigation, detailed and up-to-date vegetation information is essential to accurately assess the impact of change in vegetation cover on SVA interactions. Moreover, for applications like modelling of (agro-)ecosystems the spatial information on agricultural crop types and crop rotations for every land use parcel need to be known. However, in case of the study area, the land use datasets, which are available from official sources, only contain rather generalised information concerning agricultural areas. Read More
Thus, in this contribution, we present our work on the generation of multi annual disaggregated land use data for the years 2008-2010. Additionally, a crop rotation map of the study area is derived from the annual datasets. For this purpose the Multi-Data Approach (MDA) is applied, which integrates supervised classification results of multiple remote sensing scenes and additional spatial information by using GIS methods and expert knowledge based production rules.
