geoland2 intends to constitute a major step forward in the implementation of the GMES Land Monitoring Core Service (LMCS). The three components (Local, Continental and Global) of the LMCS are addressed. The goal of geoland2 is (i) to prepare, validate and demonstrate pre-operational service chains and products that will underpin the LMCS, and (ii) to propose and demonstrate a concrete functional organisation of the LMCS. The geoland2 deliverables are : (i) the organisation of a production network, (ii) the building of operational processing lines, (iii), the demonstration of services and products, (iv), the set up of a land user platform. geoland2 efforts will rely on the assets of previous or ongoing projects funded under FP6 (geoland, Boss4GMES), by ESA (GSE projects “Land”, “Forest Monitoring”, “GMFS”, “SAGE”, “Urban Services”) and EEA’s ”CLC/FTS 2006” project. The architecture of geoland2 is made of two different layers, the Core Mapping Services (CMS) and the Core Information Services (CIS). The CMS produce ‘basic’ land cover, land cover change, and land state products which are of broad generic use and can be directly used for deriving more elaborated products. The CMS products cover a wide variety of thematic content, spatial scales from local to global, and update frequency, from 1 day to several years. The CIS are a set of thematic elements that start from CMS products and other data sources to produce ‘elaborated’ information products addressing specific European policies. They are in direct contact with institutional end-users in charge of European policies and Member State policies which have a generic pan-European character. geoland2 gathers 51 partners from 21 European countries. The requested EC grant is 25 M€, which corresponds to a total budget of approximately 37 M€. The largest part of the budget allocation goes to the construction of the CMS.