Shortages of freshwater will be one of the most pressing problems in feeding the world this century. To optimize use of available water it is important to distribute it wisely over the various competing interests, in particular agriculture, which is responsible for 70% of all freshwater use. Irrigation is currently often unsustainable, while groundwater reserves are becoming depleted and many places in the world are suffering water shortages. Action is therefore required now to use space and in-situ monitoring systems, to create a better sense of water availability and optimise use across the planet. WaterSENSE will provide water-availability and mapping services for any place in the world at different time and space resolutions, based on integrated Copernicus data, hydrological models and local data. The results of these services will be open access so as to further develop value-adding services. WaterSENSE itself will deliver the essential value-added service of monitoring compliance of local water use against water rights and regulations (‘water auditing’). The first application will be in the multi-climate Murray-Darling Basin in Australia, followed by validation in South Africa and the Netherlands. Consortium partners already provide water-availability and water-auditing services in the latter two countries. Novel research in the project will develop scalable information services, based on advanced big-data processing algorithms, to determine variables such as evapotranspiration, irrigation water use, rainfall and soil moisture, as well as machine learning to allow automatic data processing and reduce uncertainty in the hydrological variables determined. DIAS services for data provision, as well as cloud hosting and processing of computational services, will be developed and implemented. Existing successful partnership models will be refined to ensure service providers in the water value chain achieve healthy business development.

Ground Truth 2.0 delivers the demonstration and validation of six scaled up citizen observatories in real operational conditions both in the EU and in Africa. It will strengthen the full feedback-loop in the information chain from citizen-based data collection to knowledge sharing for joint decision-making and cooperative planning. The project focuses on environmental indicators in urban and rural areas related to spatial planning issues, with a specific focus on flora and fauna as well as water availability and water quality for land and natural resources management. This is supported by an innovative web-based service for worldwide mapping and updating of land use. The overall objectives of Ground Truth 2.0 are to implement sustainable citizen observatories for the demonstration of their societal and economic benefits, and the global market uptake of the Ground Truth 2.0 concept and enabling technologies. The trans-disciplinary Ground Truth 2.0 approach consists of a multi-actor innovation process to combine the social dimensions of citizen observatories with enabling technologies so that their customisation and deployment is tailored to the envisaged societal and economic impacts of the observatories. The demonstration cases (4 EU and 2 African) cover the full 'spectrum’ of citizen-sensed data usage and citizen engagement, and therefore allow testing and validating of the concept and technologies, and evaluation of their impacts under a range of conditions. The Ground Truth 2.0 consortium presents a good mix of industry, SME, NGO, government, research and academia to ensure the roll out and uptake of the observatories. Ground Truth 2.0 is coordinating and interacting with other relevant initiatives, such as GEOSS, INSPIRE as well as the sister projects funded under the same call (namely GROW, SCENT and LANDSENSE) to create mutual synergies.

SCOREwater focuses on enhancing the resilience of cities against climate change and urbanization by enabling a water smart society that fulfils SDGs 3, 6, 11, 12 and 13 and secures future ecosystem services. We introduce digital services to improve management of wastewater, stormwater and flooding events. These services are provided by an adaptive digital platform, developed and verified by relevant stakeholders (communities, municipalities, businesses, and civil society) in iterative collaboration with developers, thus tailoring to stakeholders’ needs. Existing technical platforms and services (e.g. FIWARE, CKAN) are extended to the water domain by integrating relevant standards, ontologies and vocabularies, and provide an interoperable open-source platform for smart water management. Emerging digital technologies such as IoT, Artificial Intelligence, and Big Data are used to provide accurate real-time predictions and refined information. We implement three large-scale, cross-cutting innovation demonstrators and enable transfer and upscale by providing harmonized data and services. We initiate a new domain “sewage sociology” mining biomarkers of community-wide lifestyle habits from sewage. We develop new water monitoring techniques and data-adaptive storm water treatment and apply to water resource protection and legal compliance for construction projects. We enhance resilience against flooding by sensing and hydrological modelling coupled to urban water engineering. We will identify best practices for developing and using the digital services, thus addressing water stakeholders beyond the project partners. The project will also develop technologies to increase public engagement in water management. Moreover, SCOREwater will deliver an innovation ecosystem driven by the financial savings in both maintenance and operation of water systems that are offered using the SCOREwater digital services, providing new business opportunities for water and ICT SMEs.

Objectives: Provide currently unavailable geo-information on weather, water and climate for sub-Saharan Africa by enhancing satellite-based geo-data with innovative in situ sensors and developing related information services that answer needs of African stakeholders and the GEOSS community. Concept: A systematic feedback loop to reciprocally validate in situ measurements and satellite data in one integrated model. Over 500 in situ measurement stations using citizen science. State of the art advancement & Innovation potential: Building on and pushing further recent advances in sensor and communication technology to provide cheaper and more robust in situ measurements covering a wider area at a higher resolution in sub-Saharan Africa. Working with tech-hubs in Europe and Africa to feed creation and growth of European and African start-ups that develop sensors and geo-services, delivering complete value chains from sensor to customer-ready information delivery. Impact on call expectations: -Integration of in situ components into models based on GEOSS and Copernicus data -OGC compliant science-grade geo-data (atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere) delivered to GEOSS, incl. near-real time statistically characterized soil moisture data from Africa that can be used operationally (not currently available) and radar derived soil moisture measurements also available under cloudy conditions, or vegetation overgrowth -at least 20 new products for use in food, water, energy security, climate change and resilience to natural hazards validated and ready for large-scale implementation by consortium partners and external stakeholders -based on at least 10 innovative, cost efficient, robust, sensors, including fast neutron coun-ter, track¬ing of convective storms with consumer lightning sensors and accelerometer for tree-crown weighing -(Bio-degradable) sensors reduced to one tenth to one hundredth of their current price, extremely low-maintenance, use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.

The GROW Observatory (GROW) will create a sustainable citizen platform and community to generate, share and utilise information on land, soil and water resource at a resolution hitherto not previously considered. The vision is to underpin smart and sustainable custodianship of land and soil, whilst meeting the demands of food production, and to answer a long-standing challenge for space science, namely the validation of soil moisture detection from satellites. GROW is highly innovative project leveraging and combining low cost consumer sensing technology, a simple soil test and a large user base of growers and plant enthusiasts to contribute individual soil and land data. It is designed to engage primarily individual growers and small-scale farmers across Europe, and to enable them to develop new wisdom and innovative practices through the collective power of shared and open data and knowledge. Citizens contributing data will gain access to the first single-source comprehensive crop and watering advice service for individual and small-scale growers incorporating scientific and crowdsourced information. Moreover, they will develop ‘campaigns’ (coordinated sampling operations) around local needs and issues, to underpin smarter decision-making and implementation of policy objectives. GROW will actively identify and enable new and credible social and business innovation processes, creating potential new services, applications and markets. The outcome will be a central hub of open knowledge and data created and maintained by growers that will be of value to the citizens themselves as well as specialist communities in science, policy and industry. The GROW partnership will connect and scale to globally dispersed communities linked through digital and social platforms, and a wide range of additional citizen associations and NGOs in sustainable agriculture, gardening, food democracy and land management.