The Copernicus Land Monitoring Service officially launches the extension of HR-VPP
High-Resolution Vegetation Phenology and Productivity
On September 17, 2024, the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service’s Pan European Component launched the operational phase of the High-Resolution Vegetation Phenology and Productivity (HR-VPP2) service at the European Environment Agency (EEA) in Copenhagen. HR-VPP2 will continue the provision of vegetation phenology and production data and will expand the service by generating vegetation disturbance tree cover data for the pan-European land area. This expansion will enhance land monitoring and environmental decision-making across Europe. Originally released in 2021, the CLMS HR-VPP product suite will be continued and expanded via this new contract until August 2028.
A New Era in Pan-European Vegetation Monitoring and Analysis
The HR-VPP product suite offers the most up-to-date information, as well as improved tools and metrics, for tracking vegetation dynamics across the EEA38 + UK.
- High Resolution Vegetation Phenology and Productivity - HR-VPP:
HR-VPP2 aims to further enhance the suite of products available to estimate vegetation phenology across large areas, leveraging satellite observations to track seasonal changes in green biomass and photosynthetic activity. Building on the success of HR-VPP1, the precursor service, vegetation phenology was estimated for the -pan-European land area from Sentinel-2 (S-2) observations at 10 x 10 m spatial resolution. HR-VPP2 will further evolve the HR-VPP product suite to provide vital parameters and data that explain the dynamics of vegetation growth and productivity across the pan-European landscape.
- Medium Resolution Vegetation Phenology and Productivity - MR-VPP:
The future of the pan-European Medium Resolution Vegetation Phenology and Productivity (MR-VPP) is guaranteed within the HR-VPP2 contract. The MR-VPP dataset will be extended in the future by using data from Sentinel-3 at 333 m resolution. The entire MR-VPP dataset from 2000 will be recalibrated and harmonized between MODIS and Sentinel-3 inputs. These data provide extensive time series that enable studies on trends and co-variations with climate drivers, although they operate at lower spatial resolution than HR-VPP. The two datasets are thus complementary, and address needs of different user communities from local or national to regional and continental study interests.
- Vegetation Disturbance Tree Cover - VDTC:
Vegetation Disturbance Tree Cover (VDTC) is a novel product introduced to the HR-VPP2 service and is a response to the recently proposed EU regulation on a monitoring framework for resilient forests therefore explicitly requesting a new standardised data collection by the Commission on tree cover disturbances at pan-European scale. Biotic and abiotic forest disturbances are important drivers of ecosystem dynamics. The new HRL VDTC products will provide several information layers on tree cover disturbances at 10 x 10 m spatial resolution based on an analysis of the full Sentinel-2 time series starting from 2017.
The Copernicus Land Monitoring HR-VPP data products are accessible via an S3 buckets on the WekEO public cloud. In 2025 all data will be migrated into the Copernicus Data Space Ecosytem (CDSE).
A service provided by European top experts
The HR-VPP consortium brings together leading experts in Vegetation Phenology, Productivity, and Tree-cover disturbance, Operations and User involvement.
The production of the HR-VPP products under Lot 1 is being led by VITO Remote Sensing in partnership with European top experts from Lund University, Joanneum Research, and Space4Environment.
The review and validation process of HR-VPP under Lot 2 is being led by ACRI-ST, with support from the University of Southampton and the University of Sevilla.
