Open-Earth-Monitor Cyberinfrastructure

Project Information

OEMC

Grant agreement ID: 101059548

DOI

10.3030/101059548

EC signature date 1 June 2022

Start date 1 June 2022

End date 30 November 2026

Funded under

• Food, Bioeconomy Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment

Total cost

€ 13 780 154,06

EU contribution

€ 12 720 045,00

Coordinated by

STICHTING OPENGEOHUB
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - OEMC (Open-Earth-Monitor Cyberinfrastructure)

Reporting period: 2023-12-01 to 2025-05-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The Open-Earth-Monitor Cyberinfrastructure (https://earthmonitor.org/) will increase European capability to generate timely, accurate, disaggregated, people-centred, accessible (GSM-compatible) and user-friendly environmental information based on Earth Observation data. We will achieve this by building a cyberinfrastructure anchored in FAIR data principles, leveraging and improving our existing platforms OpenEO.org Geopedia.world GlobalEarthMonitor.eu EarthSystemDataLab.net OpenLandMap.org OpenDataScience.eu LifeWatch.eu XCUBE and EuroDataCube.com.

We do this in 3 phases:
a) implementation of the computing engine and in-situ O&M data services;
b) direct application of the Open-Earth-Monitor to support EU Green Deal and other strategic actions;
c) dissemination and engagement of stakeholders & target users through series of open workshops, then revise the tools and adjust them to better fit their objectives and limitations.

We specifically target contributing to:
operational planning for planting 3 billion trees over the EU by 2030;
achieving climate-neutrality by 2035 in the land sector;
building back a net-zero GHG emission economy by 2050;
achieving UN’s SDGs’; monitoring essential biodiversity indicators;
compiling natural capital accounts for private / public sectors;
enabling businesses to leverage competitive advantage through the EU Green Deal;
increasing the quality of life for European Citizens.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

We will innovate:
1) implementation of original cloud-based solutions to seamlessly integrate in-situ (point, site) & EO data so that we
can produce environmental information at analysis- and decision-ready levels;
2) implementation of fully-scalable Automated Mapping / AutoML frameworks;
3) user-experience-designed data provision and Apps possibly reaching millions of users across EU and globally;
4) financial assessment tools allowing users to directly quantify ecosystem services (SEEA methodology), to identify
optimal environmental and climate solutions, & to build business solutions.

Reporting Period Two:
In the 2nd part of the project, multiple milestones have been reached and multiple deliverables completed. Among various deliverables, the consortium especially proud of the following:
- Use-cases added to GeoKnowledge Hub (now with a DOI at: https://gkhub.earthobservations.org/search?q=OEMC) made publicly available;
- Landsat archive bimonthly (monthly) mosaics ARCO to be ingested to CDSE (450TB of data);
- Global ensemble DTM (30 m) and Global Ensemble Land Cover (17 classes) also to be added to CDSE;
- Pantropical commodity paper & product (10 m) upcoming;
- Africa drivers of deforestation (paper & data);
- 50 million field boundaries for pan-EU + the crop classification provided as open data;
- Soil moisture products for pan-EU / collaboration between OEMC, EUMETSAT H SAF, JRC and Italian Civil Protection for drought monitoring;
- AGB reference data for global modeling submitted;
- World-reforestation monitor: Global annual 20 m maps for LAIe / FAPAR / FCOVER for reforestation monitoring: Data, Preprint, GEE-app;
- Now almost 100 videos available on 2 international Global Workshops / upcoming summer school on EO data science (120+ participants expected);

The project consortium has also taken seriously the feedback received from the reviewers in the RP1, most importantly the project website has been updated, use cases have been registered via the Geo-Knowledge Hub and part of the project data has been uploaded to the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem. During the RP2 phase, we experienced challenges with large data volumes slowing down our work; also, making ensemble GLC product has turned to be complex because 2 parallel systems are needed (national & global); pan-EU forest disturbance system is currently only available in Google Earth Engine; only Estonia has been validated. The project still has 12+ months of the project to finish / improve automated merging and deployment of data; most importantly we now have more staff working on testing & developing data and functionality.

In addition to doing technical work, we also organized 2 events:
1) public events — hackathon at IIASA (“Geo-Open-Hack 2024”; https://av.tib.eu/series/1853)
2) Global workshop at IIASA Vienna (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrhNE3ZM42o&list=PLXUoTpMa_9s3g9lD7_aP0XB12wluSPhRJ; https://av.tib.eu/series/1684).
Both events have been video-recorded in high quality and are available under the CC-BY license. In addition, several other webinars (https://av.tib.eu/series/1959) have been added to support technical explanation of the OEMC production work.
The project publications are now also available publicly via https://www.zotero.org/groups/5705036/open-earth-monitor_cyberinfrastructure_project.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

We are currently especially enthusiastic about collaborating with the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem developers (CloudFerro) that are helping us ingest global ARD EO data (30 m, bimonthly) and that should be made available via the CDSE STAC. This could potentially become the biggest and most significant output of the project.