Environmental Geodesy: state of the art

With ever increasing global population, intense pressure is being exerted on the Earth’s resources leading to severe changes in its land cover (e. g., deforestation), diminishing biodiversity and natural habitats, dwindling freshwater supplies, and changing weather and climatic patterns (e. g., global warming, changing sea level). Environmental monitoring techniques that provide such information are under scrutiny from an increasingly environmentally conscious society that demands the efficient delivery of such information at a minimal cost. Environmental changes vary both spatially and temporally, thereby putting pressure on traditional methods of data acquisition, some of which are very labour intensive, such as animal tracking for conservation purposes. With these challenges, conventional monitoring techniques, particularly those that record spatial changes call for more sophisticated approaches that deliver the necessary information at an affordable cost. One direction being followed in the development of such techniques involves Environmental Geodesy, which can act as stand-alone method, or to complement traditional methods. This contribution looks at its current state of the art.