GMES programme and the related
EUFOREO thematic network. Studying
some candidate services.
Buchroitner, M.: Establishing an envi-
ronmental GIS for remote mountain
regions: the Altai example.
- global, European and national GII,
- metadata and GIT data gathering,
- interoperability and standards,
- geodata management and geodata
warehouses,
- geo-information on the Web,
- GIT in utilities and transport networks,
- remote Sensing,
- mobile GIT,
- GIT in geology and mining.
University of Ostrava and to the
Municipal Authority services.
regional conference:
- local students, researchers and service
providers, who appear quite active in the
field of Geographic Information,
- regional audience. In addition to Czech
attendants, participants from Germany,
Austria, Poland, Slovakia attended.
- the international audience (beyond the
region) included participants from
France, Turkey, Algeria and Japan.
highly skilled specialists in geo-informa-
tion for environment and civil enginee-
ring.
region, whereas most of these countries
are going to join the European Union.
They will be full members in 2008, when
GMES is planned to be fully operational.
Therefore, GMES will be their own pro-
gram for Environment and Security. As a
consequence, it is quite important to
involve them as soon as the first phase of
the GMES action plan ("Strand 1"). In
addition, no other regional opportunity
was identified in the region before the
EUFOREO concerted action deadline
(March 2003) and the end of the GMES
strand 1 (end of 2003).
Forest is a quite important issue in
GMES, as well as the leading theme of
two identified EUFOREO services.
Other topics of the Conference have
and with some themes of
the 6
tant to advertise widely
about GMES and the 6
GMES, which should be a
key tool for the regional
management of environ-
mental and security
issues.
known specialist Pr. G. Konecny empha-
sised the interest (and costs) of remote
sensing technologies. This is a key tech-
nological issue that cuts across all the
GMES themes. Actually, the very begin-
ning of the GMES concept was the so-
called Baveno Manifesto, issued by
space agencies. This raised sometimes
some criticisms about a "technological
push" of GMES. Now, it can reasonably
be considered that these times are over
and that the right concepts have found
their right place within GMES.
remote mountain regions: the Altai
example' by M. Buchroitner - another
world-wide known specialist - addressed
technological issues connected with the
setting up of GIS in complex remote
areas. Modern technologies offer a wide
range of tools to feed GIS with quite dif-
ferent layers of geocoded information,
thus allowing GIS to be key tools for a
lot of applications that request to handle
multi-layered geocoded information,
from scientific research to decision ma-
king for land use management. The use
of geographic information through GIS
for environmental and/or management
purposes is quite developed in the region.
It is taught in Universities, several ser-
vice providers have attractive offers, and
administrative services widely use GIS
to assist policy makers at all scales.
cific importance for Central Europe. It
then focused on four "candidate ser-
of the EUFOREO concerted action, that
appeared of specific regional impor-
tance:
- monitoring of indicators for biodiversi-
ty and nature protection,
- flood-related services,
- forest fire-related services,
- other forest-related services (global car-
bon mass, ARD issues).
from the audience and the specialists
consulted in side meetings. As anticipa-
ted, forest fires rose less interest than
other services, which are now developed
in the region mainly through `traditional
methods'. The candidate services are
well in line with the regional needs.
GMES is expected to offer valuable ser-
vices to the region and will hopefully
find enthusiastic actors, either from the
suppliers or the users side.
services and the use of remote sensing
technology
prices of data and processing are per-
ceived as a hindering factor. Some ser-
vice providers make use of remote sen-
sing for general or dedicated purposes
(such as Corine Land Cover maps).
Other service providers chiefly use tradi-
tional information (mainly aerial photo-
graph) to feed the GIS services they
offer.
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