The EU-funded Geoland2 project is responsible for the development of pre-operational GMES land monitoring services. The core mapping services include land cover change monitoring at various scales and geophysical and vegetation parameters for seasonal and annual change monitoring. In addition, information services have been developed that demonstrate the added-value of the initial services in various fields, such as spatial planning, agricultural-environment, water monitoring, forest monitoring, land-carbon monitoring and global crop monitoring.

Currently there are five downstream service projects:

• European Forest Downstream Services-Improved Information on Forest Structure and Damages, EUFODOS

• Enabling access to geological information in support of GMES, PanGeo

• The GMES Service Snow and Land Ice, CryoLand

• Operational Pan-European River Runoff, OPERR

• High Resolution Freshwater Monitoring, FreshMon

There are also five projects that have evolved from the service: ISAC for agriculture, BIO_SOS and MS.MONINA for biodiversity, ReCover and REDDAF for deforestation.

There is also the HELM service project for land monitoring and two other projects on deforestation for international cooperation: REDD-FLAME and REDDINESS.

Complementing the GMES land service and the downstream services, contracts for the Forest Monitoring and the Global Monitoring for Food Security project have been extended until 2012 in the frame of the ESA-funded GMES Service Element.

The Forest Monitoring project addresses policy-related demands for securing ecological functions in the forestry and land-use sector. It also delivers services such as yearly carbon balance information, forest disturbance data and products for practical forest and land-use management.

The Global Monitoring for Food Security project provides early warning, agricultural mapping and crop yield and biomass assessment services in support of food security monitoring activities in Africa.