OBSERVER: CLMS Snapshots – a new era in environmental storytelling
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The Copernicus Land Monitoring Service is expanding its reach through its CLMS Snapshots, a new tool which uses interactive, visually rich story maps to bring land monitoring insights to wider audiences. These story maps translate complex environmental data into accessible narratives for journalists, educators, environmental communicators, and the public. Each Snapshot focuses on a broad theme and uses real-world examples across Europe to illustrate land surface change and its societal impacts. In this Observer, we explore how CLMS Snapshots translate authoritative data into accessible stories, extending the reach and relevance of Copernicus Land Monitoring products beyond specialist communities.
The Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS) is known for its high-quality open-access land data. Like the other Copernicus Services, CLMS data products have a long history of use by researchers, public authorities, and private businesses, and in recent years have begun to play a central role in official European environmental policy reporting and implementation.
However, there are many opportunities beyond these established user communities. Many journalists, educators and environmental communicators are only beginning to discover the service and the storytelling potential of its products. Broadening this engagement can significantly improve the societal impact of CLMS data.
Introducing CLMS Snapshots
CLMS is introducing a new communication tool aimed at targeting exactly these untapped audiences. CLMS Snapshots are visually rich interactive narratives which are designed to showcase how CLMS data can be used to support environmental storytelling. Delivered as story maps, Snapshots use satellite-derived data to show how complex land surface changes can be translated into visually driven narratives which appeal to a non-expert audience.
Each CLMS Snapshots story focuses on a distinct theme and brings together a number of visually-driven case studies which give us a “snapshot” of the theme. For example, the first two Snapshots stories—now available on the CLMS website—are focused on ground motion and snow. These thematic areas are intentionally broad, allowing each story to explore multiple regions, scales, and topics which all fit under the umbrella of a shared environmental challenge.
Following on the heels of the December webinar focused on introducing CLMS to journalists, Snapshots stories present concrete illustrations of how CLMS data can support environmental storytelling. The Snapshots are intended to engage journalists, educators, and other environmental communicators by demonstrating how land monitoring data can reveal new angles, support distinctive visual narratives, and anchor complex stories in robust, open data. Designed to be accessible to non-experts, these stories also aim to reach a broader public audience.
A tour of the 2026 themes
The European Ground Motion Service (EGMS) allows users to monitor and map ground motion with millimetre precision across Europe and serves as the primary CLMS data product used in the ground motion-themed Snapshots story. In this story readers can learn about how much the ground sinks per year in various locations along the European coasts and what it means in the context of sea level rise. They will be shown the rapid uplift in hotspots around the continent and walked through what it might mean for the people who live there. Finally, they will see how the volcanic activity on Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula has evolved over the past several years and how the region is adjusting to their new reality.
The snow-themed Snapshots story, on the other hand, focuses on the changing snow dynamics across Europe and on how this shifting dynamic is already affecting both daily life and long-term decision making of people across the continent. It begins with an examination of interannual variations in snowfall and their implications for winter recreation, urban planning, and hydropower generation, before moving to an overview of how changing snow dynamics affect alpine plant ecology and the distribution of bat species. The Snapshot story ends with a detailed analysis of how Saharan dust storms affect snow dynamics in the Pyrenees by accelerating melt and altering the timing of downstream water availability. CLMS Snow datasets play a central role in this Snapshots chapter, with products like Fractional Snow Cover and SAR Wet Snow enabling the visualisation of where and how long snow persists on the ground and when snow transitions from dry to wet. Together, these products support the analysis not only of how much snow falls, but of how snow behaves within and between seasons.
What’s next
This project will continue to expand over time, with new thematic Snapshots added on a rolling basis. The next major addition, a story focused on European forests, is planned for release in the second half of 2026.
With the launch of these Snapshots, the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service is taking a new step toward making its data more visible. The longer-term ambition is to build a growing, publicly available library of interactive story maps this new audience can draw inspiration from, ultimately helping CLMS achieve broader recognition and user uptake.
Improving how CLMS data are communicated to non-specialist audiences ultimately benefits the entire Copernicus ecosystem. Providing these examples of visual storytelling based entirely on reliable, high-quality, open-access data helps reinforce trust in the Copernicus Services more broadly by highlighting their ability to address real-world environmental challenges.
