Coastal zones are critical regions, accommodating a significant proportion of the global population and hosting diverse ecosystems that provide essential services. Coastal “Blue carbon” ecosystems, such as mangroves, seagrasses, and salt marshes, play a crucial role in carbon sequestration and storage, biodiversity and coastal protection. Despite their socio-economic and biological importance, they face numerous threats from human activities and climate change, necessitating their conservation and management. Mapping, modelling and monitoring coastal zones using Earth Observation (EO) data is essential for this task. It needs to consider the complex coastal dynamics, past and future change scenarios, and the interaction between Blue Carbon and the coastal zone dynamics. By integrating EO data, advanced modelling techniques, and detailed process-based morphodynamic models, COASTS aims to develop a downstream service for coastal observation, with a focus on Blue Carbon. This service, utilizing Copernicus Marine and other initiatives, will provide govern. stakeholders and coastal planning with relevant information for developing coastal management strategies, including the assessment of blue carbon habitats and their environmental services. Further, COASTS will develop innovative methods and comprehensive analyses to create new business models related to emergent blue carbon markets and will offer new international income sources for countries with blue carbon ecosystem presence. COASTS will initially focus on pilot sites in Germany, Jersey, and the Maldives where govern. customers have a demand and support the project. The learnings from these examples will form a blueprint for broader application in other regions in response to a growing global need. Supported by an interdisciplinary team and strong links with governmental institutions, the COASTS project presents an innovative, scaleable and sustainable approach to coastal conservation and blue carbon management.

TREASURE will provide specialist training in the strategic and emerging area of European GNSS. Collectively, GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite Systems) includes systems such as the US Global Positioning System (GPS) and the Russian GLONASS, as well as the new, under development systems like China’s Beidou and most importantly Europe’s Galileo. Galileo is what we call the European GNSS (EGNSS) and is to be fully operational around 2020, therefore the pressing need to invest on research and training right now. This is especially so because GPS has clearly been the frontrunner of all these systems and has dominated the market for two decades now. EGNSS (Galileo) is aimed at changing this market unbalance and is the main focus of this proposal, which concentrates on its use in support of applications demanding high accuracy positioning and navigation. TREASURE’s cohort of 13 young researchers will be given gap-bridging innovative training through an exceptional and unique network of industrial, research and academic beneficiaries, with the aim to form a group of outstanding researchers who would not be able to acquire the equivalent set of skills by training at any individual European institution alone. World-class expertise on EGNSS exists in Europe, however multi-disciplinary research skills need expanding to maximise the enormous potential that there is for promotion and exploitation of this technology. TREASURE addresses that need and responds to the much desired involvement of end-users and businesses, by bringing together four top Universities, one research Institute and four leading European companies, with extensive track record and experience in a wide breadth of disciplines to provide the necessary coordinated research training that will enable the ultimate real time high accuracy EGNSS solution.