The overall objective of the project is to develop a virtual environment equipped with FAIR multi-disciplinary data and services to support marine and freshwater scientists and stakeholders restoring healthy oceans, seas, coastal and inland waters. The AquaINFRA virtual environment will enable the target stakeholders to store, share, access, analyse and process research data and other research digital objects from their own discipline, across research infrastructures, disciplines and national borders leveraging on EOSC and the other existing operational dataspaces. Besides supporting the ongoing development of the EOSC as an overarching research infrastructure, AquaINFRA is addressing the specific need for enabling researchers from the marine and freshwater communities to work and collaborate across those two domains. A specific goal of AquaINFRA will be to develop an EOSC based research infrastructure combining the marine and freshwater domains, which will include the development of a cross domain and cross-country search and discovery mechanism as well as building services for spatio-temporal analysis and modelling through Virtual Research Environments. A set of strategic use cases including a Pan-European use case as well as more focused use cases in the Baltic Sea and the North Sea will provide the setting for co-designing and testing services in the targeted research communities. The AquaINFRA project results are expected to contribute to the utilisation of EOSC as an overarching research infrastructure enabling collaboration across the domains of marine and freshwater scientists and stakeholders working on restoring of healthy oceans, seas, coastal and inland waters.

ESRIUM is a multi-national project with the common goal to set up a service to foster greener and smarter road usage, road maintenance, and to increase road safety. The key innovation will be formed by a homogeneous, accurate and recent digital map of road surface damage and road wear. ESRIUM’s core proposition is a data platform, which hosts highly detailed EGNSS-referenced map data of road damage and associated safety risks at centimeter-level resolution. Further addressed as “road wear map”, it will contain unique information, which is of value to multiple stakeholders: road operators will be able to lower the road maintenance effort by optimal planning. Further, road operators will be able to lower road wear and increase traffic safety especially for heavy vehicles. Considering the market introduction of partly automated truck fleets, the precise track of these vehicles can be adjusted by communicating precise routing recommendations in- and cross-lane. Truck fleet operators following these recommendations can receive tolling benefits, and increase the general safety for their vehicle fleet. Especially with the increasing levels of autonomy, systems will utilize infrastructure support to handle the requirements of the automated driving task and additional external requests. In ESRIUM, these opportunities are addressed by utilizing C-ITS infrastructure and EGNSS based localization in planning the trajectories of such automated vehicles. Key to the ESRIUM innovation is a precision localization service, which provides reliable locatization information of road damages and of the vehicles using the roads. Considering a European-level business-case, only Galileo may provide such a service in homogeneous quality, even at very remote locations on the European continent.

The EU Mission ‘Restore our Ocean and Waters’ (Mission Ocean) aims at protecting and restoring the health of our ocean and waters through research and innovation, citizen engagement, and blue investments by 2030. The creation of the European Digital Twin Ocean (EU DTO) supports this mission as well as the key initiative of the European Commission, Destination Earth (DestinE), aiming at developing a highly accurate digital model of the Earth on a global scale to be able to monitor, simulate, and predict the interaction between natural phenomena and human activities. Addressing the Horizon Europe call HORIZON-MISS-2023-OCEAN-01-8, SEADITO focuses on the need for a targeted set of analytical methods and tools to support the development of the EU DTO including integrating social-ecological models in order to establish a comprehensive decision support platform. SEADITO aims at increasing transdisciplinary abilities of social-ecological models by updating and integrating them for improved Ecosystem-based Management, and a set of case studies in the Baltic Sea, the North Sea and the Mediterranean as well a Pan-European case study will provide the contexts for the multi-actor processes identifying user needs, as well as co-designing and testing components and services in the targeted user communities. The results will include sets of interoperable, spatial explicit, and DTO compliant social-ecological decision-support components based on FAIR principles (e.g. to be integrated with EDITO-Model Lab), as well as scalable and multi-level social-ecological models, integrated quantitative and qualitative social-ecological indicators, and workflows quantifying and integrating cultural and behavioural aspects. The components will be tested through an interactive spatial platform, the SEADITO Explorer equipped with visual demonstrators of social-ecological models and a Scenario Toolkit (WIST). Learning materials will target young researchers, decision-makers, and the public.

Geospatial data are nowadays collected with various sensors (hyperspectral cameras, LiDAR, etc.) and platforms (airplanes, drones, ground robots) and processed with advanced methods (e.g. photogrammetry, artificial intelligence - AI, etc.) in order to deliver analyses- and decision-ready thematic products. These products can be used, among others, for environmental monitoring, sustainable use of space, spatial analyses, simulation and predictions. The I-DEAL project aims to foster new skills and strengthen human resources performing a series of secondments to develop new, unconventional approaches for geospatial data acquisition, processing, verification and usage to support the European Green Deal actions. New methods based on AI, robotics, oblique aerial cameras, LiDAR and hyperspectral sensors, and combining ground, airborne and satellite data for the monitoring of various ecosystems (atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere and built environment) will be investigated, tested and applied in various scenarios. Investigations will tackle different Green Deal ambitions, sharing and exchanging complementary expertise to boost geospatial technologies and improve Earth monitoring and climate change mitigation. Scientific events and transversal training activities will also be organized and offered to support career developments. The integration of I-DEAL intersectoral aspects will allow researchers to see, understand and exploit private company approaches or mapping agency methodologies; at the same time, non-academic people and service providers will exchange with and benefit from R&D activities and in-house products. The I-DEAL consortium consists of 14 partners from 11 countries, with practitioners and commercial representatives, as well as scientists with diverse educational backgrounds, such as technical, engineering, natural and socio-economic. The project will run for 48 months with a total number of 186 months of secondments.