WaterInnEU’s primary vision is to create a marketplace to enhance the exploitation of EU funded ICT models, tools, protocols and policy briefs related to water and to establish suitable conditions for new market opportunities based on these offerings. WaterInnEU will build upon existing knowledge bases and platforms developed in previous projects but will provide new concepts, connections, and components that are essential for a marketplace to work. The primary goals can be detailed in five major objectives: a) Gather the outcomes of previous European funded projects, and contribute to their dissemination and exploitation to be used as an instrument for supporting the implementation of the Water Framework Directive (WFD). b) Assess the level of standardization and interoperability of these outcomes as a mechanism to integrate ICT-based tools, and incorporate open data platforms and generate a palette of interchangeable components that are able to use the water data emerging from the data sharing processes and data models stimulated by initiatives such as the INSPIRE directive. c) Create the marketplace as a service: a forum formed by water research projects representatives, stakeholders in the water domain, and companies (in particular SMEs), who are capable of moving current products into the market and offer them to, for example, river basin managers, at different levels. The user segment will mainly benefit from the capability of the water partnerships (e.g. the Global Water Partnership), in bringing together a wide variety of water sector stakeholders and practitioners such as decision makers, public and private users, local, regional and international entities, multidisciplinary stakeholders. d) Build an open virtual marketplace that includes the Water Knowledge Portal of projects and research (WISE-RTD), a user feedback facility and a success stories portfolio, additionally to the current tools and policies lists.

Unprecedented availability of free-to-access satellite data from the Copernicus programme has started to transform approaches to the assessment, monitoring and sustainable management of our aquatic environments. However, whilst the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service delivers the first generation of inland water quantity and quality products, other directly related products are fragmented across other services (e.g. EMS, C3S, CMEMS, CAMS, CIS). R&D capabilities have rapidly expanded through H2020 and ESA projects working on inland water challenges, but lack of coordination has led to a fragmented approach to evolving the service components and some confusion in a potentially broad user community. Thus, this expansion has not been matched by uptake of these products by decision makers, monitoring agencies, industry or the wider public. Water-ForCE will co-create a Roadmap for the development of the next phase of Copernicus Inland Water Services with the space sector, research community, policy, industry and third sector. The Roadmap will be benchmarked against community requirements, recommending services that should be delivered centrally by Copernicus and innovation opportunities that are better suited for business and research development. The Roadmap will also provide the strategy to ensure effective uptake of water-related services by end users, further support the implementation of relevant directives and policies and evidence policy development. This cross-disciplinary approach will align in situ and remote observation as this is essential to furthering the exploitation of operational observation platforms. A strategy to integrate in situ networks will be defined, integrating approaches to product validation and filling observation gaps and thus strengthen user confidence. Technical requirements for the future Copernicus sensors will also be specified for optimal inland water monitoring needs and future service development.