THE POTENTIAL OF REMOTE-SENSING FOR MONITORING RURAL LAND-USE CHANGESAND THEIR EFFECTS ON SOIL-CONDITIONS

The paper reviews the principles of existing remote sensing techniques and neu methods considered particularly suitable for monitoring rural land use changes and their effects on soil conditions. Conventional c lassification methods in combination with local field surveys an opera tionally used in national as well as in supra-national environmental a nd agricultural inventories established by the EU such as the European Commission's CORINE programme (Coordination of Information on the Env ironment) and the MARS project (Monitoring Agriculture with Remote Sen sing). The 'Environmental Mapping and Modelling Unit' (EMAP) of the EC Joint Research Centre, in cooperation with other partners, is investi gating the use of operational earth observation satellites and airborn e hyperspectral data (imaging spectrometry) for mapping and monitoring of vegetation and soil characteristics. In the context of previous ex periments, approaches such as spectral mixture analysis have been deve loped which can already be routinely applied to large regions. Problem s related to the standardised retrieval of remotely sensed primary par ameters (such as reflectance), concepts for the thematic interpretatio n of reflectance data, and the definition of satellite-derived land de gradation indices are discussed. On this basis, the requirements for t he design of an operational satellite observatory for environmental mo nitoring are presented. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.