MS.MONINA – Multiscale Service for Monitoring NATURA 2000 habitats (FP7 - SPACE)

Every six years, EU member states have to report on the state of natural habitats within their NATURA 2000 sites. Therefore, services that enable objective, operational and economically priced information about the state of the environment within such sites are on demand.
The MS.MONINA project is designed to provide such serv­ices, not only at the benefit of national authorities, but also aimed at local authorities that manage these sites, and EU authorities that oversee the overall development of the NATURA 2000 programme. Hence the project is designed to provide three different kinds of services; in­tegrating data from satellites and in-situ measurements at the sites.
At the local level the project will support site monitoring with information products meeting the requirements of site managers. These products are derived from high resolution satellite images and reflect habitat status and changes. At the national level, the project engages in complete reporting on sensitive sites and habitats, deliv­ered to national authorities respon­sible for reporting on the im­plementation of the Habitats Directive. At European level MS.MONINA supports region wide report­ing on the implementation of the Convention on Biological diversity within the EU.

Within the project frame, the department of geoinformation in environmental planning focuses on the transferability and interoperability between the national and international datasets of the three scales. For this purpose, the derived products of three focus regions in Belgium, Germany, and Greece will be investigated. Moreover, our group is supporting the modelling of potential habitats from already existing geoinformation for a subsequent a priori use within classification processes.