DIANA is aimed at co-designing and openly demonstrating a commercial service platform that will empower water managers and authorities to optimise the identification and inspection of non-authorised water abstractions for irrigation as well as improve their water management policies and practices, especially in extreme conditions such as drought. DIANA will leverage EO data provided by Copernicus and other data sources as well as state-of-the-art models for the identification of (illegally) irrigated areas and the estimation of abstracted water volumes in order to offer a value added suite of data products and services, that will be affordable and cost-effective. The value propositions of DIANA will be co-created and defined along with users and stakeholders so as to be shaped according to their needs and requirements. Three pilots will be deployed in order to put them to the test in real operational environments of Spain, Italy and Romania. All pilots will be integrated with the work flows of the users and their results will be co-evaluated and validated with them through a multi-layer methodology, fostering the acceptance of DIANA as a marketable solution. In order to ensure the demand-driven design of the DIANA service platform as well as set the stage for its market launch and uptake following the end of the project, a customer-driven business modelling process will be followed during the project, validating its business case and producing an effective business plan to serve as the roadmap for its post-project commercialization. Finally, DIANA is implemented by a transnational and well-balanced consortium, consisting of innovative SMEs and pioneering authorities, all of which possess the complementary expertise as well as the motivation and commitment required to ensure not only the creation of meaningful project outcomes but also their successful commercial exploitation and sustainability.

COALA will develop Copernicus-based information service for irrigation and nutrient management for the Australian agricultural systems, starting from the consolidated past experiences of the proposed European partnership, but based on strong collaboration with Academic Australian institutions and business players in the agricultural sector of Australia. Operational farming advisory services will be further developed on one hand to include nutrient managements on the other to provide water accounting data from the farm to the district and/or basin scale. COALA will monitor crops development, water and nutrient status, irrigated areas by means of innovative algorithms based on Sentinel Earth Observation data, which will be accessed by means of the new cloud platforms (DIAS) of Copernicus. In-situ and other source of data will be used to improve the accuracy of the products for the final users, which will be on three different levels: i) farmers, ii) irrigation infrastructure operators, iii) basin authorities. COALA will demonstrate that Copernicus data and new DIAS infrastructure can greatly improve the availability of information for management decisions on irrigation and nutrient management at all decision levels, from the Water Authority in charge of monitoring the implementation of the basin exploitation plan, to the farm level, passing through the irrigation infrastructure operators, in charge of managing irrigation distribution infrastructures. COALA tools and data will improve the decision making and policy for sustainable use of water and nutrients in multi-functional ecosystems. Through this project, it will be possible to explore new business opportunities in Australia for the European industry of Earth Observation services.

The objective of LANDSUPPORT is the construction of a web-based smart geoSpatial Decision Support System (S-DSS), which shall provide a powerful set of tools devoted to (i) support sustainable agriculture/forestry, (ii) evaluate trade-off between land uses (including spatial planning) and (iii) contribute to implementation, impact and delivery of about 20 European land policies and also selected 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals including climate change resilience goals and the key SDG 15.3 “achieving a land degradation-neutral world”. This objective is achieved by the integration of already existing databases (interoperability) at different scales with the development of high performance modelling engines simulating agriculture & forestry (e.g.crop growth), land degradation and environmental issues (e.g.fate of pollutants, ecosystem services). All the above, including their validation by remote sensed data will be ensured by a technology at the state of art for the developing environment (i.e.COMPSs), high-performing computing (e.g.GPU) and massive raster data management (e.g.RASDAMAN). LANDSUPPORT will be applied at four geographic scales: EU; 3 Nations (Italy, Hungary, Austria); 2 European Regions in IT and HU; 3 pilot sites in AU, IT, HU; and 2 pilot sites in Tunisia and Malaysia. By doing that, LANDSUPPORT will reconcile grand agriculture/environmental sustainability policy ambitions with operational reality as required by RUR-03-2017 call such as the evaluation of “land use trade-offs” and “incentivizing real actions/behaviour/investments”; all requiring activities at detailed spatial scale. LANDSUPPORT fits with the priorities of this work programme, as LANDSUPPORT S-DSS is (i) scientific and technology innovation as driver for rural development, (ii) a framework for innovation and new business models adapted to the rural context, (iii) support for skills development in rural communities, (iv) a new approach towards policies and governance (subarea 1).