Land Change

1University of Maryland, Department of Geography, 2181 LeFrak Hall, College Park, MD 20742 USA 2U.S. Geological Survey, Alaska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, University of Alaska Fairbanks, 214 Irving I, Fairbanks, AK 99775 USA 3Center for Global Change ...

To ensure systematic long-term observations of the environment several efforts have been made in recent years to provide international coordination of observational systems working within the framework of various overarching international organizations. One such effort is known as Global Observations of Forest Cover/Global Observations of Land Cover Dynamics (GOFC/GOLD). Originally it was set up to consider the monitoring of forests and hence the original name of Global Observations of Forest Cover (GOFC) but has been extended to all land cover types (see section 4.3). GOFC/GOLD is one of the Panels of the Global Terrestrial Observing System, an organization sponsored by four UN bodies, namely the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the International Council for Science (ICSU). GOFC as an organization was originally set up by the Committee for Earth Observing Satellites (CEOS) and it retains close links with that organization because of the importance of spaceborne remotely sensed observations to the goals of GOFC/GOLD. In this chapter we review the goals of the organization and make an assessment of progress made in realizing the plans formulated in the later part of the 1990’s. In doing the latter we propose a new template which is used to assess objectively how close we are to achieving the goals of long term operational systematic observations of land cover for the whole globe.