The Environment Agency Austria (Umweltbundesamt, EAA) was established in 1985 and is the environmental specialist institution of the Austrian Federal Government. As Austria´s largest expert organisation for the environment and one of Europe´s leading environmental consultants we are committed to transforming the economy and society in order to ensure sustainable living conditions. With over 500 experts from 55 disciplines we develop an interdisciplinary and cross-cutting knowledge base for decision making on the local, regional, European and international level. EAA undertakes environmental monitoring, assessment and evaluation for the Austrian Minister of the Environment, plays a key role in the implementation of federal environmental laws, EU directives and regulations, provides expert advice to federal and other institutions, designs and operates national environmental databases and is involved in multiple co-operations with national and international institutions. It plays an important role in the EIONET, in that it is the National Focal Point (NFP) for the European Environment Agency (EEA) as well as leader or partner in several European Topic Centres and it is the National Reference Centre of the EEA in several areas. EAA works transparently and independently and engages in dialog with stakeholders in politics, public administration, business, science and civil society.
EAA has in particular expertise in all fields of qualitative and quantitative land and soil protection, such as land cover and land use monitoring, soil sealing and land take, soil and water contamination, ecological impact assessment of agricultural practices, LULUCF reporting and climate change adaptation as well as processing of GIS data. Some years ago awareness raising measures and citizen in-volvement for the protection of soil has been added as a further field of work.
In LANDSUPPORT, EAA has a major role in WP6 on testing and validating DSS tools, and it is involved in WP1 as a tasklead, WP2, WP3, WP5 and WP7.
