NATIONAL LAND COVER AND RESOURCE STATISTICS

Abstract. An overall societal aim is to ensure a sustainable use and management of a country’s land resources. This requires continuous deliv-ery of reliable and up-to-date information to decision-makers. To be able to deliver this information the Norwegian Forest and Land-scape Institute (Skog og landskap) produces, among others, land resource statistics for all municipalities in Norway. The statistics are also produced on a county level and for the whole country. The acreage numbers are retrieved from a combination of different na-tional datasets in various scales together with interpretation of satellite images. Through a reclassification, statistics are calculated for certain land resource classes like arable land, pasture, forest based on productivity class, fresh water, snow and glacier, mountain-ous/scarcely vegetated area and built up area. Skog og landskap has for the last couple of years been using open source software. The whole statistics production line is carried out by the means of such software. The results are stored in XML-files that are published on the internet. The production requires processing of several databases with national coverage, and needs to handle geometric opera-tions efficiently and without error. The open software solution is reliable, stable and fast.