10 YEARS OF IMAGING THE EARTH: SPOT VEGETATION

Since April 1998, the VEGETATION mission allows daily monitoring of terrestrial vegetation at regional and global scale. The VEGETATION programme is a joint initiative of the European Commission, the Belgian Science Policy (BE), CNES (FR), SNSB (SE) and ASI (IT).

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the SPOT VEGETATION instruments onboard satellites SPOT-4 and SPOT-5, the Belgian Science Policy and UCL-Geomatics have collaborated to design 7 posters, a global one and one for each continent (except Antartica).

Each poster is a unique composite of all daily images recorded for 10 years by the VEGETATION instruments and processed to highlight at best the diversity of the areas.
The bathymetry and the polar areas are derived from the Blue Marble Next Generation.

For each continent 5 very visual insets underline some of the main processes experienced in the last 10 years in the continent. The selected themes for Africa are for example desertification, refugees, water resources, population boom and food security.

Finally a website (http://eoedu.belspo.be/vgt10) was developed to provide online acces to the posters and a complement of information about each one of the posters’ insets. The website will be available in English, French and Dutch.

These materials (posters and website) were designed for the general public, including high schools.

Posters will be printed in a limited number of specimens and put at disposition of interested teachers via Belgian associations of geography teachers and the ESERO desk in Brussels.