SPOT World Heritage contribution to the temporal series of satellite observation of the French mountains

Abstract

This paper presents the quantification of the revisit contribution, of the Theia center’s collection of historical SPOT images from the SPOT WORLD HERITAGE program in relation to Landsat’s and ASTER’s archives of optical images with decametric spatial resolutions over the French  mountains between 1986 and 2015. During this period, the SPOT 1 to 5 satellites largely contributed to the number of acquisitions, with the Theia collection contributing up to 36.6% of the acquisition dates between 1996 and 2005. Making this collection of exploitable images available to the public offers a new window on the last decades for various applications in ecology, hydrology and land planning.