Alan S. Belward works for the European Commission at the Joint Research Centre, where heads the Land Resource Management Unit. Dr. Belward received the BSc degree in Plant Biology from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1981, and MPhil and PhD degrees in remote sensing studies of vegetation, both from Cranfield University’s School of Agriculture Food and Environment in 1986 and 1993 respectively. In the 1990s he co-chaired the International Geosphere Biosphere Programme’s Land Cover Working Group and chaired the Committee for Earth Observing Satellites (CEOS) Working Group on Calibration and Validation. From 2002 to 2006 he chaired the Global Climate Observing System’s (GCOS) Terrestrial Panel and in 2009 he was appointed to the GCOS Steering Committee. He is a member of the NASA and USGS Landsat Data Continuity Mission Science Team and the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 Mission Advisory Group and is also a visiting lecturer at the Technical University of Vienna where he teaches Environmental Technologies and International Affairs.