Team

The following partners are part of the Land Cover CCI team:

• Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain), Belgium
• Brockmann Consult (BC), Germany
• Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et l'Environnement (LSCE), France
• Met Office - Hadley Centre (MOHC), United Kingdom
• University of Exeter (UNEXE), United Kingdom

The Land Cover CCI consortium is organised into three main pillars or areas of expertise of equal importance in terms of success for the project:

• EO sciences team pillar, under the leadership of UCLouvain. This pillar includes developing the Land Cover ECV product, including preprocessing by BC, land cover classification, land cover change detection and ensuring consistency in space and time over the longest EO period available, and Plant Functional Types retrieval by UCLouvain. Methodological developments relate to validating land cover change, deriving C3/C4 fractions for herbaceous vegetation globally, and estimating the end-to-end uncertainty budget led by UCLouvain and BC, respectively.
• Climate Research Group pillar, under the coordination of the LSCE, MOHC, and UNEXE. This pillar includes the evaluation of the impact of using the PFT map series over the conventional maps based on a generic cross-walking table in two land surface models - ORCHIDEE and JULES. Our activities also aim to improve the accuracy and reliability of land-use change emission estimates in the Global Carbon Budget (GCB) by addressing key gaps in deforestation monitoring and modelling.
• System engineering pillar, under the responsibility of Brockmann Consult. This pillar includes the translation of the results into analysis-ready datasets.

In support of these pillars, the management activity is operated by UCLouvain.

Since the beginning of the CCI, the Land Cover consortium has also worked closely with other partners: Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M), Germany; Gamma Remote Sensing (Gamma), Switzerland, Joint Research Centre (JRC), Italy; University of Pavia (UPavia), Italy; Centre de Recherche Gabriel Lippmann (CRP), Luxemburg; University of Jena (UJENA), Germany, and Wageningen University (WUR), The Netherlands.

User Groups

Several actors and types of users can be identified as representatives of the modelling communities concerned with climate and climate change issues. Potential users that define model requirements originate from groups specialized in different fields of science: e.g., working in weather prediction, Global Circulation Modeling (GCM), Regional Climate Modeling (RCM), Global and Regional Earth System modelling, Carbon Cycle Modeling, Dynamic Vegetation and Hydrology modelling and others.

Potential users of the new land cover products are also model development application groups working in numerical weather prediction (NWP), GCMs and RCMs, global and regional Earth System models, carbon cycle models and dynamic vegetation and hydrology models.

From this large array of different users, model usage can be conceptualized at different levels of model engagement in the project:

1. Key user group. They are central to all phases of the user interaction within the project and are an integral part, as partners, of the project. They are the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M), the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnment (LSCE) and the Meteorological Office Hadley Center (MOHC). Key users are directly involved in the product specifications, product assessment and the final user assessment of the product.
2. Associated user group. These users may be participating in meetings and in the user survey and their input would feed into the product specifications. These users are not partners in the project directly but could be engaged, in particular, if involved in the user assessment of the products.
3. Broad user community. It will be considered through the information of the project through the World Wide Web and through reviewing scientific literature, participation in meetings to synthesize requirements for the product specifications and receiving feedback from general global land cover data users. This group of users would also include known user requirements coming not directly from climate modellers but the “climate concerned” users such as those making use of land cover information for other societal benefits or national reporting and accounting.