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The main goals of the GEOLAND project are to specifically develop:
a) an Educational Handbook for monitoring European Landscape,
b) a Web based GIS platform where numerous geospatial data may be uploaded and analysed and students’ opinion about landscape will be obtained through questionnaires and crowdsourcing.
Monitoring and protecting the Landscape is a crucial environmental goal that is planned to be achieved by GEOLAND. The project aims to enable the uptake of novel ways to engage and empower students in environmental science and stimulate participatory decision-making. In addition, GEOLAND will highlight the fact that students and, in general, citizens can in fact have a real impact in environmental monitoring and landscape management.
GEOLAND will:
1. explore and develop educational procedures for the effective participation of Higher Education (HE) students and Professors in decision-making for landscape management, planning and protection of NATURA 2000 sites.
2. enable the uptake of novel ways to engage and empower HE students in environmental science and stimulate participatory decision-making.
In particular, it will provide the opportunity to students, citizens and stakeholders to become interested in the definition and implementation of landscape policies and to play an active part in setting sustainability indicators of desirable landscape quality objectives (Landscape Quality Objectives/LQO).
3. attempt to identify and summarize the environmental/cultural stratification in the examined landscapes through a sophisticated Landscape Character Assessment (LCA). On the basis of this Assessment, the capabilities of geospatial technologies (Earth Observation and Geographic Information Systems) and Web-based GIS applications will be exploited.
4. encourage/introduce innovative pedagogies (citizen science), technologies and state of the art approaches (LCA) to higher education studies in Europe, while addressing issues of teaching and learning about Landscape as a multidisciplinary subject area in universities.