Land Use Mapper

More than ever before, planners and policy makers need tools to anticipate and assess the impact of their decisions on the spatial system that they are to manage. Land-use maps are important input data for the decision support tools. Typically, the required time series of land-use maps based on identical and consistent mapping methodologies, legends and scales are missing. Existing services, such as CORINE or data products from Copernicus, lack the flexibility in terms of spatial, temporal and thematic resolution in order to be useful for many kinds of uses, such as land-use change modelling, air pollution modelling, hydrological modelling, flood early warning systems, DSS tools, etc. Furthermore, remote sensing data are useful for deriving land cover, but there are challenges in deriving land-use data, which relates to the way people actually use the land.

The Land Use Mapper (LUM) is a web-based tool to create land-use maps of any area selected by the user. The aims of the Land Use Mapper are (1) to improve the availability of land-use data, (2) improve the consistency of time series of land-use maps, and (3) improve the accessibility of land-use information.

The Land Use Mapper interface will have a free version and a premium service. The free version will generate land-use maps with a standard legend at a fixed spatial resolution. In the premium service, the user can choose other legends and spatial resolutions that better fit their needs. All generated maps will be archived for historic land-use analysis and the service will be registered in GEOSS and connected to the Copernicus Land Service. The Land Use Mapper will also be connected to other tools developed in the different demonstration cases that need actual land-use data.

The land-use maps are derived from features that have been mapped by citizens through the OpenStreetMap platform. OpenStreetMap represents physical features on the ground (e.g., roads or buildings).
The Land Use Mapper will be developed by UNESCO-IHE in cooperation with CREAF, VITO, Upande Ltd. and STARLAB. It will be ready in May 2018.