Environmental Data
Environmental data comprise data on weather, terrain, soil, hydrologic conditions (hence abiotic data). Within EcoGRID we also consider land use, infrastructural and historical landscape elements, habitat characteristics, vegetation types and Remote Sensing images to be part of the environmental data. Environmental data are meant as explanatory variable, boundary condition or input for models that are being developed or applied through EcoGRID.
For this purpose it is important that the environmental data are available for the area to which the models are applied (often the entire Netherlands), and are available at the appropriate resolution (e.g. 1 km2). Environmental data are available in the form of vector maps (e.g. Top10-vector), raster maps (e.g. remote sensing images) and point data (e.g. weather data), and these three formats are processed accordingly in EcoGRID.