The main objective of EO4AGRI is to catalyze the evolution of the European capacity for improving operational agriculture monitoring from local to global levels based on information derived from Copernicus satellite observation data and through exploitation of associated geospatial and socio-economic information services. EO4AGRI assists the implementation of the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) with special attention to the CAP2020 reform, to requirements of Paying Agencies, and for the Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS) processes. EO4AGRI works with farmers, farmer associations and agro-food industry on specifications of data-driven farming services with focus on increasing the utilization of EC investments into Copernicus Data and Information Services (DIAS). EO4AGRI addresses global food security challenges coordinated within the G20 Global Agricultural Monitoring initiative (GEOGLAM) capitalizing on Copernicus Open Data as input to the Famine Early Warning System Network (FEW-NET). EO4AGRI assesses information about land-use and agricultural service needs and offers to financial investors and insurances and the potential added value of fueling those services with Copernicus information. The EO4AGRI team consists of 11 organizations, complementary in their roles and expertise, covering a good part of the value-chain with a significant relevant networking capital as documented in numerous project affiliations and the formal support declarations collected for EO4AGRI. All partners show large records of activities either in Copernicus RTD, governmental functions, or downstream service operations. The Coordinator of EO4AGRI is a major industrial player with proven capacities to lead H2020 projects. The EO4AGRI project methodology is a combination of community building; service gap analysis; technology watch; strategic research agenda design and policy recommendations; dissemination (incl. organization of hackathons).

The impacts of climate change on people, planet and prosperity are intensifying. Many regions and communities are struggling to avoid losses and need to step up the effort to increase their climate resilience. Ongoing natural capital degradation leads to growing cost, increased vulnerability, and decreased stability of key systems. Therefore, the European Mission on Climate Adaptation acknowledges the need to adopt a systemic approach by working across sectors and disciplines, experimenting, and involving local communities. NBRACER steps up to this challenge with an innovative and practical approach to accelerate the transformation towards climate resilient regions that are safe, green, clean, healthy, and just. Adaptation will be based on the smart packaging of nature-based solutions (NBS), rooted in the resources supplied by biogeographic landscapes, and embedded in a transformative action approach that mobilizes and enables regions and communities to accelerate forward. NBRACER works with Demonstrating and Replicating regions in the European Atlantic biogeographical area to vision and co-design place based sustainable NBS that are at one with the regional landscapes, upscaling these into coherent regional packages and building time and place specific adaptation pathways integrating local solutions and regional scales. This process is supported by a regional scale effort to build adaptation journeys with community support, with input from teams testing and validating place based NBS solution portfolios situated in landscapes. Innovative technical and adaptation transformation support packages provide quantitative mapping methods and a transformative action approach and capacity building, and networking enable scaling out and building connections. Led by Deltares, advanced in climate adaptation science, the consortium builds synergy from the strength of practitioners, ecosystem engineers, innovators of transformative adaptation, finance, and capacity building experts.

The AIRMES project focusses on optimising end-to-end maintenance activities within an operator’s environment. It will develop and validate an innovative, state-of-the-art, integrated maintenance service architecture that will be a key step in achieving the goal of no technically-induced aircraft operational disruptions in European air traffic. The AIRMES consortium is led by an airline / MRO that has a clear vision, and is keen to exploit radically new and challenging ways to achieve their objectives. They are supported by expertise in systems health monitoring, semantics, knowledge based engineering, architecture, diagnostics, prognostics, maintenance planning and optimisation, and mobile tools for remote support of maintenance activities. Truly a unique consortium. The service architecture will be structured around an operationally focused collaborative environment IT platform, integrating multiple functionalities and it will accelerate the shift in European aviation, from scheduled maintenance to condition-based maintenance. By blending this knowledge based environment with mobile tools for remote support, using augmented reality technologies and two way communication solutions, the resulting service architecture will provide contextualised, updated and integrated information to all members of the maintenance value chain. The impact of this project on European Air Traffic will be significant. In Europe, 5.8% of all flights are delayed due to direct aircraft technical causes and consequential delays on subsequent flights; the cost of this disruption is estimated at 2.8 B€. By reducing operational disruptions, reducing the average delay time and improving aircraft utilisation, through a grant value of 4.6 M€, the impact of this 48 month, 12 partner AIRMES project will be significant and assessed to around 1B€ per year.

Agriculture is a, literally, vital industry. Not only important for nourishment, but also a key determiant of health, economic and political stability; employment; business and biological ecosystems; and society. Because of its importance, most attention focuses on productivity but it is essential to have a global view in order to address environment sustainability problems. EUXDAT proposes an e-Infrastructure, which addresses agriculture, land monitoring and energy efficiency for a sustainable development, as a way to support planning policies. In order to do so, we need to address the problems related to the current and future huge amount of heterogeneous data to be managed and processed. EUXDAT builds on existing mature components for solving them, by providing an advanced frontend, where users will develop applications on top of an infrastructure based on HPC and Cloud. The frontend provides monitoring information, visualization, different parallelized data analytic tools and enhanced data and processes catalogues, enabling Large Data Analytics-as-a-Service. EUXDAT will include a large set of data connectors (UAVs, Copernicus, field sensors, etc.), for scalable analytics. As for the brokering infrastructure, EUXDAT aims at optimizing data and resources usage. In addition to a mechanism for supporting data management linked to data quality evaluation, EUXDAT proposes a way to orchestrate tasks execution, identifying whether the best target is a HPC center or a Cloud provider. It will use monitoring and profiling information for taking decisions based on trade-offs related to cost, data constraints, efficiency and resources availability. During the project, EUXDAT will be in contact with scientific communities, in order to identify new trends and datasets, for guiding the evolution of the e-Infrastructure. The final result of the project will be and integrated e-Infrastructure which will encourage end users to create new applications for sustainable development.

With the advent of the Copernicus program with its wealth of open data, the Earth Observation application and service development domain is increasingly adopting big data technologies. This adoption is first related to efficient data storage and processing infrastructures, but most importantly data analytics and application development framework. CANDELA project main objective is to allow the creation of value from Copernicus data through the provisioning of modelling and analytics tools given that the tasks of data collection, processing, storage and access will be provided by the Copernicus Data and Information Access Service (DIAS), which the team is fully familiar with. The implementation starts by putting in place a set of powerful tools that drastically lowers the cost of getting familiar with the data and creating new services. These modules adopt new developments in the domain of machine learning, data mining, data fusion and web semantics, combining the Copernicus data and information with other non-Earth Observation data sources to derive novel applications and services. CANDELA will demonstrate the breadth of project capabilities with a real-life small demonstrator by means of two reference scenarios: a “macro-economics and agriculture” scenario to show how remote sensing capacities to extract adequate information from images could be used to feed economical models; and a “forest health monitoring” (FHM) scenario which aim is to present how Earth Observation satellite data collection can be used for the monitoring of forest health conditions. CANDELA team is a well-balanced consortium, consisting of nine partners from five European countries, and with strong participation from the industry as encouraged by the Call, being half of the partners well positioned SME’s.