Mapping & Monitoring

Land monitoring via Earth Observation 

We keep an eye on the world. Mapping and monitoring the planet’s surface and its features based on Earth Observation (EO) data is a key competence of GAF. As a leading company in the provision of land monitoring products and services derived from EO, we have a longstanding and proven track-record regarding mapping and monitoring at regional, national and international scales.

Expert knowledge and technology for VHR topographic mapping and monitoring services

We cover a variety of thematic domains such as forest, grassland, agriculture, urban, infrastructure, habitats, climate change and general land cover. By combining expert knowledge and the latest technologies to create informative and accurate raster and vector products, we support our customers’ endeavours and European as well as international policies such as the European Green Deal and the SDGs. 

We offer both highly accurate topographic mapping products derived from the visual interpretation of very high resolution optical EO data by our experienced operators, and land monitoring products (semi-)automatically derived using cutting-edge and state-of-the-art methods and technologies based on various very high and high resolution optical and radar EO data.

GAF has many years of experience with and contributes significantly to the production and development of the European Copernicus Services, which are used worldwide:

• GAF is a service provider in many projects in the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service, such as HRL VLCC, CLC+ (Backbone, Core & Instances), Riparian Zones, Natura2000, InSitu, Validation, EGMS, etc.
• GAF contributes to the evolution of the Copernicus Land Service with R&D projects like the Horizon Europe project EvoLand and the Horizon 2020 project ECoLaSS.
• GAF is also a service provider for the Copernicus Emergency Management Service, which provides rapid mapping in cases of natural disasters, man-made emergency situations, and humanitarian crises.

Since 2005, GAF has been involved in a global initiative to produce near-global coverage of very accurate and complete 2D topographic vector data. Our experienced team is fully dedicated to 2D vector mapping, geospatial intelligence activities and vector data quality control. It thus ensures:

• Services characterised by the highest quality standards, including European and international mapping standards such as DGIWG-FDD. The standard that is used has found its way into many areas of application, including military, national-security-related and civil usage.
• Data models containing roughly 180 object classes, each with several attributes.
• Data services securing national and international defence and security needs.