Multi-task remote sensing supporting the development of environmental policies for National Park regions in the Central European Space

National park regions are strongly influenced by heterogeneous patterns of human impact varying both in time as well as in space. Developing management issues to support regional planning has to focus on the specific National Park region itself. Integration of the municipalities of the region is a must. The collection and exchange of spatial informations of the region has to be provided by spatial information systems, which should then connect local authorities, district authorities and the National Park Administrations. The projects under investigation focus on the establishment and maintenance of spatial data bases in digital formats as a fundamental for monitoring and planning. A focus is laid on the collection and analysis of spatial data of the natural and cultural values of the regions to allow for land use and land cover change analysis as well as for the analysis of the socio-economic and socio-ecological dynamics in the regions. The implementation of effective data sets and tools for supporting regional planning at local and regional levels with special regard to the different zones of the National Parks is fostered by a close cooperation of university institutes, research institutions, governmental institutions at the state, the regional and the local level and national park administrations themselves. Due to different geographical and ecoclimatic as well as political conditions, different tasks and different strategies have been developed. Common interests are laid on building high-resolution digital terrain models of the regions by means of airborne laser scanning, on developing high-resolution mosaics of ortho-imagery of the regions by airborne and spaceborne CIR-imagery, on establishing a full coverage data layer of digital maps of types of landscape (biotope, ecotope), on providing tools for cross-border coordinate transformation and on establishing and/or extending GIS expertise at the national park administrations.