The Global vegetation Monitoring Unit carries out several activities related to Land Cover mapping and monitoring. In particular the GVM Unit is coordinating and implementing the Global Land Cover 2000 Project (GLC 2000) in collaboration with a network of partners around the world.

The general objective is to provide for the year 2000 a harmonized land cover database over the whole globe. The year Two Thousand is considered as a reference year for environmental assessment in relation to various activities, in particular the United Nation's Ecosystem-related International Conventions.

To achieve this objective GLC 2000 makes use of the VEGA 2000 dataset: a dataset of 14 months of pre-processed daily global data acquired by the VEGETATION instrument on board the SPOT 4 satellite, made available through a sponsorship from members of the VEGETATION programme, including JRC.

On June 3rd, 2002, Dr. Reid, Director of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment has informed us that GLC 2000 will be used both in the full MA assessment reports and in the various summary and synthesis reports, with full acknowledgment GLC 2000 partners will be included in the list of "MA associated scientific organizations and Academies of Sciences the GLC 2000 dataset will be included among the core MA datasets

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