Hi Christian, there is a whole field that tries to answer these questions called Earth Observation (closely related to Remote Sensing and Geospatial Analysis). These fields employ techniques of computer vision and AI. There are numerous use cases of earth observation data for administrative, commercial and social good topics. You were definitely right about the mentioned applications for land cover data, this list might give you some more inspiration: https://gisgeography.com/100-earth-remote-sensing-applications-uses/