Open Innovation and Tools (continued)

Monitoring of Water Quality (WQ) in coastal areas is of concern to many human activities for their relevant ecosystem and economic values. The EU issued the Water Framework Directive (WFD) and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) for fostering the correct management and monitoring of coastal waters and nearby open sea. The Member States implemented them into their respective national legislation by appointing a central institute for coordination and reporting to EU and by assigning the monitoring to local environmental authorities/agencies: Italy is an example of that, where the measurement of the WQ parameters is demanded to regional authorities (ARPA) which perform regular sampling campaigns at sea and coordinated at national level by a central institute (ISPRA). Such practices, however, are expensive and the area covered and the frequency of the campaigns are limited and need to be integrated by other means.

WQ measurements from Earth Observation (EO) is a common practices based on past (ENVISAT), present (AQUA, TERRA, VIIRS) and future (Sentinel-3) missions, but up to know they lack in spatial details (ranging between 300m and 1km) and accuracy in the proximity of the shoreline, which prevents them to be a concrete support for coastal areas monitoring.

This talk tells how Planetek has managed to set up an operational service, intended as continuous access from the user to information – such as spatially and accuracy-enhanced WQ measurements (chlorophyll, water transparency and turbidity) -, as response to the need of local authorities to provide reporting in accordance to the above mentioned directives.

The service - experimented in the context of the Integrated Coastal Water Management for Mediterranean (ICWM for MED) project, an ESA Integrated Application Programme, under ARTES 20, funded project – relies on Rheticus, the Planetek cloud-based data and services hub designed to deliver products through complex automatic processes which integrate EO data, real time in situ measurements and other local information.

This service model is now part of the Planetek offer, and, among the first customers, there is the Province of Thesprotia (Region of Epirus, Greece), that, through the SAIMON project, part of the “GREECE-ALBANIA IPA Cross Border Programme 2007-2013”, aims to establish a Near Real Time and continuous satellite monitoring network for the eutrophication risk over the total eligible marine area of interest for the program, which will be available via the internet to the citizens, the scientific community and the responsible authorities.

Finally, the talk describes the evolution of the service implemented in the context of the ESA C-TEP project, where the interaction of Rheticus (child C-TEP) with the central CTEP processing node (mother C-TEP) brings to a further extension of the overall service capabilities.

Wildfire Management Tool (WMT) is a software application based on the Campbell Prediction System (CPS) that estimates the potential behavior of a wildland fire so that firefighting strategies can ensure the safety and effectiveness of firefighters. The purpose of this tool is to provide an analysis of the potential fire behavior, and to visualize the areas of risk and/or opportunity.

This project is an effort to enhance both the response and training of wildland firefighters and fire behavior analysts. WMT provides useful fire behavior estimates on active wildland fires and analyses of historical fires. WMT uses the NASA WorldWind SDK for the virtual globe and is employed today in the US and Europe to fight wildfires.

WMT is free, open source software provided by Emxsys. It is licensed under the BSD-3 license. WMT is based on The Campbell Prediction System (CPS) by Doug Campbell and augmented by Marc Castellnou of the Pau Costa Foundation. WMT merges the art of wildland firefighting and the science of fire behavior--it couples the language and logic of CPS with the fire spread equations developed by Richard Rothermel.

WMT's fireground analysis leverages the BEHAVE algorithms of Rothermel and Albini, as well as the study of Uncertainty Propagation in Wildland Fire Behavior Modeling by Andreas Bachmann.

This presentation will use WMT to demonstrate the variables and criteria fire fighters must consider and how those can be adjusted to estimate the fire's behavior so that strategic intervention can be more effectively applied at the tactical level.

The creation of valuable content from large and growing volumes of Earth Observation derived data is a challenge for research organisations around the world. Ecometrica has developed a web mapping platform that makes it easy to access, organise, share, query and analyse spatial data on land cover and ecosystem services without requiring GIS or remote sensing expertise on the end user side.

The EO Lab platform is a cloud based spatial content management system that gives organisations the capacity to develop multiple content sharing applications. Application managers can pull together data sets, areas of interest and narrative information for dissemination, discussion and learning with defined groups of users.

Each mapping application is bespoke and designed to answer questions relevant to a defined problem and geography. End users are able to interrogate the data to produce actionable reports, download reports and receive alerts; all through a simple web interface, eliminating the necessity of installing specialist software.

Governments, industry and research all face the challenge of overcoming the fragmented style of EO activities that have previously been of limited scale and consistence. Data has traditionally been stored on unconnected devices, with analysis requiring download to GIS, making the sharing of mission critical information difficult.  The EO Lab approach enables the move away from fragmented, offline and siloed data management to up to date, connected and controlled data curation, allowing improved stewardship of data. Essential functions include viewing and querying spatial data. Summary reports can be downloaded in both pdf and spreadsheet format. Access is secure but mapping applications can also be made publicly available.

By providing access and analysis of expert spatial data layers, the platform can be used in various ways e.g. by publishing or sharing research results with peers, and providing practical and insightful advice to non-specialist end users, industry groups and policy makers. Depending on how a mapping application has been customised, end-users can obtain quantitative and qualitative information about resources; measure impacts and opportunities; check compliance to environmental legislation; and monitor changes to vegetation, water and other resources.

This paper will demonstrate and discuss various examples of mapping applications created on Ecometrica EO Labs, showing how cloud technology are supporting national agencies, NGOs, development banks and businesses to make better decisions in areas such as forest protection and restoration, climate smart agriculture, water resource management and disaster recovery and resilience.