Central Idea

Information about current state and recent changes of landscape-creating elements and scenery (such as forests, lakes, meadows etc.) are important basics for environmental impact assessment (EIA), urban development plans and recreation plans, forest management and environmental politics and decision- making on a local and a regional scale.
Currently parameters of interest can be obtained manually, by the aid of remote sensing methods or by extrapolating results from former inventories. Conventional data collection is time and cost consuming, inaccurate and in some cases not reproducible (quality of measurements is depended on the measuring person).
In addition, an integrative concept in environmental assessment that leads to an optimization of limited budgetary funds and a wide range of usability is missing. Based on this situation analysis requirements that have to be reached by a future-oriented, integrative inventory concept can be formulated:

Data to be collected:
a) time and cost- efficient,
b) detailed,
c) in an objective way and
d) contemporary.

Comparative figures for evaluating the new concept will be obtained from conventional inventories. It must be taken into consideration that the method should be independent from the subject of the inventory, this means the above mentioned inventory method has to be suitable in forests as well as in fields or parks etc. Raw data tuning and data processing (i.e. cartographic presentations and maps) with secondary software should create no problems.