GIS-Ready Countrywide Land Cover Maps

Intermap Technologies Corp. (CO, USA and Definiens AG (Germany) have announced at Intergeo that they have signed an agreement to develop a land cover vector layer product called EARThemes, covering all of Germany and the United Kingdom. EARThemes combines radar imagery, digital surface models, and IFSAR data and through an automatic analysis engine creates uniquely accurate land cover datasets.

Available beginning January 2007, EARThemes will consist of a contiguous, contemporary thematic layer of Germany and the U.K. that includes five categories of land cover: urban, vegetation, agriculture, water, and rural area. Polygons of non-vegetated and non-populated areas will include additional slope information. The data will be available in an Arc GIS format, ready to integrate into any GIS application within or outside the ESRI environment.

EARThemes can be utilised by local and state government agencies and commercial enterprises to harness the valuable information from radar imagery without the need to be a radar expert. The product provides accurate and up-to-date GIS ready basic land cover information without any gaps. It can serve as the foundation layer in the areas of urban planning, forestry and agriculture management, watershed analysis, and infrastructure characterisation.

The land cover classification dataset is enabled by Intermap Technologies' collection of lnterFerometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (IFSAR) data for its NEXTMap Deutschland and NEXTMap Britain programs. Both efforts are part of a larger Intermap strategy to completely map Western Europe by the end of 2007.