Urban areas across Europe are undergoing rapid morphological transformations driven by densification, redevelopment, and infrastructure expansion. Monitoring these urban changes requires operational, harmonized, and reproducible approaches grounded in Earth Observation. This study presents a Copernicus use case demonstrating how the High-Resolution Layer Imperviousness Change (2015–2018) and Urban Atlas datasets can be integrated with the Guidos Toolbox (GTB) to quantify structural urban change across six metropolitan areas (Milan, Sofia, Riga, Warsaw, Viseu, Santander). Morphological Spatial Pattern Analysis (MSPA) and entropy-based indicators were applied to characterize land take, fragmentation, compaction, and internal reorganization of impervious surfaces. The combined framework captured both configurational morphology and spatial disorder, revealing divergent development patterns: pronounced heterogeneity and fragmentation in Sofia, stabilization or compact growth in Milan, Warsaw, and Santander, controlled densification in Riga, and localized intensification without outward expansion in Viseu. All analyses rely on openly accessible Copernicus data and open-source tools, ensuring full reproducibility and transferability. Outputs were disseminated through a FAIR-compliant geoportal developed within a Copernicus FPCUP project, supporting transparency and reuse. The findings underscore the value of Copernicus services for operational urban monitoring and provide a scalable methodology to support European land-use policies, including the Zero Net Land Take 2050 target and the EU Soil Strategy.

Extraction of building footprints from freely available, high temporal resolution satellite imagery is important for applications ranging from disaster response to monitoring informal settlements. While Sentinel-2 is globally available, limited spatial resolution restricts the reliable detection of small or densely packed structures. We propose a novel framework that re-targets a super-resolution backbone (ESRGAN) to generate cartographic map-style outputs directly and fuses it with a semantic segmentation network through joint training. Unlike pipelines treating super-resolution and detection as sequential tasks, our approach leverages map-centric supervision, unifying enhancement and building delineation. For evaluation, we introduce the S2-BDOT-PL dataset, integrating Sentinel-2 imagery with OpenStreetMap and BDOT10k ground truth. Results demonstrate improved precision and robustness in small-building detection compared to native resolution baselines.

The western barbastelle and soprano pipistrelle are prominent examples of European bats associated with forests. This makes them prone to adverse effects from human driven deforestation and forest structure alteration due to climate change. Although soprano pipistrelles have maintained stable population numbers, due to opportunistic ecology, the western barbastelle is considered one of the rarest bats in EU. In our study we investigated the spatial distribution and foraging habitat preferences of both species in the Białowieża Forest, a natural Central-European mixed lowland forest. To understand movement patterns during the summer seasons of 2022, 2023 and 2024 we radio tracked a total of 15 barbastelles (eight males and seven females) and 13 soprano pipistrelle females. Spatial information, in addition to standard home range and roost selection, was analysed for habitat preference using detailed forest structure maps obtained via Polish State Forests databases. Our study revealed that in well preserved forests bats home ranges were particularly small, including the smallest to date median home range for barbastelle females (224 ha). Additionally foraging habitat analyses (a Chi squared goodness of fit) revealed that soprano pipistrelles used all habitat types in line with availability while barbastelles showed a preference towards both wet and deciduous dominated habitats. Our research highlights the importance of effective water management in protected woodlands, as drying processes may have adverse consequences for the conservation of rare and protected species.