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University of Barcelona/European Topic Centre Land Use and Spatial Information supported by the European Environment Agency (EEA)

The UAB ETC/SIA is an international consortium contracted by and assisting the European Environment Agency (EEA) in delivering information on the state and trends of the environment through the provision of timely, targeted, relevant and reliable information to policy-making agents and the public. The consortium is leaded by the Universidad de Málaga since January 2011.
In order to achieve these aims, the UAB ETC/SIA works closely with the EEA Member States (EIONET) in establishing regular harmonized data flows to support current and upcoming environmental reporting obligations. The UAB ETC-LUSI Core Team is a group of 12 international experts holding university degrees in geography, geology, biology and IT and experience in regional, national and European projects in several fields of the GIS/SDI and manage the Terrestrial Information System (TERRIS) – a reference database for environmental spatial information in Europe especially oriented to facilitate spatial analysis and the development of environmental indicators.
The work agenda of the UAB ETC/SIA Core Team is driven by the main policy needs regarding environment, sectoral integration and planning in Europe. Through the analysis and understanding of spatial change, the core team and its wider network is closely interrelated with other EEA priority areas, such as biodiversity loss, climate change, human health & quality of life.

Main international research activities

  • Coordination of the European Corine Land Cover 2000 and 2006
  • Development of a harmonized European methodology for the identification of risk areas for soil contamination.
  • Development of the spatial dimension agro-environmental indicators for IRENA
  • Leading the DG Environment Working Group on Indicator and Data to develop a set of indicators to monitor progress in Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) since 2002
  • Spatial modelling and analysis in support of integrated environmental assessments and development of indicators for assessing the European State of the coast
  • Support in developing the Shared European Integrated Spatial Information Service through integration of new basic reference data into TERRIS (e.g. data set on urban morphological zones to analyze spatial changes in and around urban areas and their interaction with the surrounding land – access to recreational areas)
  • Developing the method on “Land and Ecosystem Accounting” (LEAC) together with the EEA – a method to measure land cover changes based on different inventories of the CLC (or other) database
  • Through LEAC methodology, a number of indicators have been calculated (eg. fragmentation of land and ecosystems, land take by urban sprawl and transport networks, pressures on protected areas, etc.)

Besides that, UAB ETC/SIA is partners in several European projects under the framework of FP6 and FP7. Colleagues are also involved and members of several national working groups like Spanish SDI or UNSDI (United Nations SDI).

The project will essentially be implemented by:

  • Mr. Jaume Fons PhD in Biology, environmental analyst. He holds a PhD on biology (1995). His research focused on plant and soil relationships and related applications to forest management, reforestation of degraded areas and the impact of land abandonment on the Mediterranean. He has been involved in several international projects (Europe and Canada) and has been working for the ETC since 2001, where he has coordinated the soil related projects. In particular he has focused on the impact of the most dynamic land process like those derived from the Common Agricultural Policy or urban sprawl.

Role in the project:

UAB is involved in WP3 on scenarios of change.