We are proud to share the news that we’ve been granted the European Space Agency Tender Invitation To Tender on WORLD COVER. With the World Cover project ESA aims to deliver to the public a land cover map of the entire globe at 10m resolution based on its Sentinel-1 and 2 data. 

The World Cover team has the ambition to establish a new baseline global land cover product that is developed and validated in almost near-real time and at the same time maximizes the impact and uptake for the end users. World Cover intends to provide a substantial benefit to various user communities and expands the established global land cover base of users and the development of novel services.
 

 

Snapshot of the upcoming World Cover product: Sentinel 1 and 2 based land cover product (right) over Senegal
(MGRS tile 28PEV) with example of used input layers (Sentinel 1 and 2 temporal metrics, left).
See https://lcviewer.vito.be/ for the used color scale.

Besides a focus on users, World Cover will represent a tremendous step forward towards the joint use of  Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data for worldwide land cover mapping. Until now only regional or continental land cover maps solely based on Sentinel-2 data have been produced while the use of Sentinel-1 SAR data in the production of land cover maps is still in its infancy. With Sentinel-1 and 2 now being at full capacity, World Cover will provide the ideal base to explore the synergetic use of Sentinel-1 and 2 at global scale for land cover mapping and result in a major step forward for both related science and services.

VITO (Belgium) is the prime contractor of the World Cover consortium together with Brockmann Consult (Germany), CS SI (France), Gamma Remote Sensing AG (Switzerland), International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (Austria) and Wageningen University (The Netherlands).