The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) was flown aboard the space shuttle Endeavour February 11-22, 2000. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) participated in an international project to acquire radar data which were used to create the first near-global set of land elevations. Endeavour orbited Earth 16 times each day during the 11-day mission, completing 176 orbits. SRTM successfully collected radar data over 80% of the Earth's land surface between 60° north and 56° south latitude with data points posted every 1 arc-second (approximately 30 meters). SRTM Void Filled elevation data (at 3") are the result of additional processing to address areas of missing data or voids in the SRTM Non-Void Filled collection. The voids occur in areas where the initial processing did not meet quality specifications. Since SRTM data are one of the most widely used elevation data sources, the NGA filled the voids using interpolation algorithms in conjunction with other sources of elevation data. The resolution for SRTM Void Filled data is 1 arc-second for the United States and 3 arc-seconds for global coverage.

GlobCover is an ESA initiative which began in 2005 in partnership with JRC, EEA, FAO, UNEP, GOFC-GOLD and IGBP. The aim of the project was to develop a service capable of delivering global composites and land cover maps using as input observations from the 300m MERIS sensor on board the ENVISAT satellite mission. ESA makes available the land cover maps, which cover 2 periods: December 2004 - June 2006 and January - December 2009. For maximum user benefit the thematic legend of GlobCover is compatible with the UN Land Cover Classification System (LCCS). The system is based on an automatic pre-processing and classification chain. Both of the two global land cover maps (2005/2006 and 2009) provided in the framework of GlobCover have been validated by an international group of land cover experts and the validation reports were made available to the user community. Except for the global land cover maps, a set of MERIS by-products were also made freely available through the main data distribution source, ESA Ionia Server.

The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) was flown aboard the space shuttle Endeavour February 11-22, 2000. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) participated in an international project to acquire radar data which were used to create the first near-global set of land elevations. Endeavour orbited Earth 16 times each day during the 11-day mission, completing 176 orbits. SRTM successfully collected radar data over 80% of the Earth's land surface between 60° north and 56° south latitude with data points posted every 1 arc-second (approximately 30 meters). Andy Jarvis and Edward Guevara of the CIAT Agroecosystems Resilience project, Hannes Isaak Reuter (JRC-IES-LMNH) and Andy Nelson (JRC-IES-GEM) have further processed the original DEMs to fill in these no-data voids. This involved the production of vector contours and points, and the re-interpolation of these derived contours back into a raster DEM. These interpolated DEM values are then used to fill in the original no-data holes within the SRTM data. Resampled data (250m, 500m, and 1 km): https://hc.box.com/shared/1yidaheouv (Password: ThanksCSI!) Citation Jarvis, A., H.I. Reuter, A. Nelson, E. Guevara, 2008, Hole-filled SRTM for the globe Version 4, available from the CGIAR-CSI SRTM 90m Database (http://srtm.csi.cgiar.org).

The Global Multi-resolution Terrain Elevation Data 2010 (GMTED2010) provides a new level of detail in global topographic data. Previously, the best available global DEM was GTOPO30 with a horizontal grid spacing of 30 arc-seconds. The GMTED2010 product suite contains seven new raster elevation products for each of the 30-, 15-, and 7.5-arc-second spatial resolutions and incorporates the current best available global elevation data. The new elevation products have been produced using the following aggregation methods: minimum elevation, maximum elevation, mean elevation, median elevation, standard deviation of elevation, systematic subsample, and breakline emphasis.

The CCI-LC team has successfully produced and released its 3-epoch series of global land cover maps at 300m spatial resolution, where each epoch covers a 5-year period (2008-2012, 2003-2007, 1998-2002). These maps were produced using a multi-year and multi-sensor strategy in order to make use of all suitable data and maximize product consistency. The entire 2003-2012 MERIS Full and Reduced Resolution (FR and RR) archive was used as input to generate a 10-year 2003-2012 global land cover map. This 10-year product has then served as a baseline to derive the 2010, 2005 and 2000 maps using back- and up-dating techniques with MERIS and SPOT-Vegetation time series specific to each epoch.

The first 30 m resolution global land cover data set with 10 classes and for the year 2000 and 2010. Global Land Cover (GLC) information is fundamental for environmental change studies, land resource management, sustainable development, and many other societal benefits. Although GLC data exists at spatial resolutions of 300 m and 1000 m, a 30 m resolution mapping approach is now a feasible option for the next generation of GLC products. Since most significant human impacts on the land system can be captured at this scale, a number of researchers are focusing on such products. This paper reports the operational approach used in such a project, which aims to deliver reliable data products. Over 10,000 Landsat-like satellite images are required to cover the entire Earth at 30 m resolution. To derive a GLC map from such a large volume of data necessitates the development of effective, efficient, economic and operational approaches. Automated approaches usually provide higher efficiency and thus more economic solutions, yet existing automated classification has been deemed ineffective because of the low classification accuracy achievable (typically below 65%) at global scale at 30 m resolution. As a result, an approach based on the integration of pixel- and object-based methods with knowledge (POK-based) has been developed. Data citation: CHEN Jun et al.: 2015.Global land cover mapping at 30 m resolution: A POK-based operational approach. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Volume 103, May 2015, Pages 7–27 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2014.09.002 Available at: http://www.geodoi.ac.cn/WebEn/doi.aspx?Id=163