EIFFEL will offer the EO-based community the ground-breaking capacity of exploiting existing Group on Earth Observations (GEOSS) and external datasets, with minimal new data collection activities. Added-value services interoperable with GEOSS will be designed, using cognitive search and metadata augmentation tools based on Artificial Intelligence (AI), including Natural Language Processing. These tools will leverage advanced cognitive features to extract meaningful information from and enrich GEOSS metadata. Moreover, novel methods (super resolution, data fusion) for augmenting the spatiotemporal resolution of explored EO data will be proposed, in order to address the needs of the diverse EIFFEL CC adaptation and mitigation applications.
The project will promote the development and uptake of 5 pilot applications from different geographic areas and climate regions, addressing the UN Sustainable Development Goals, The Paris Agreement and the Sendaï Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and aligned with GEO Societal Benefit Areas: i) Water and Land Use Management, ii) Sustainable Agriculture, iii) Transport Management, iv) Sustainable Urban Development and v) Disaster Resilience. The project targets urban, regional, national, and cross-border scales with a view to upscale their scope and results to larger areas and to a pan-European scale.
The main objectives of the EIFFEL project are to:
- Exploit the untapped potential of available GEOSS datasets, i.e., satellite, in-situ, modelling, crowd-sourced, by creating AI-based cognitive search tools;
- Leverage techniques of Explainable AI to develop tangible indicators for Climate Change impacts;
- Contribute to GEO’s new infrastructural feature, the GEO Knowledge Hub, a digital repository providing access to knowledge needed to build GEOSS-driven applications;
- Foster the co-design of Climate Change adaptation and mitigation applications by bringing onboard the decision makers who are working towards the Paris Agreement goals at local, regional and national scales;
- Develop, using co-creation, a set of Climate Change adaptation and mitigation applications in different and quite diverse GEO Societal Benefit Areas, in order to demonstrate the project innovations.
SYKE is responsible for the pilot on Disaster Resilience and will develop a framework for the risk assessment of: (i) droughts, (ii) forest fires, (iii) forest pests at regional and national scale in Finland. GEOSS data sources will be integrated with national databases to potentially enhance existing drought and forest fires risk assessments and to develop a new forest pest risk mapping tool. The pilot will support monitoring, seasonal forecasts, and long-term projections of forest risks at regional and national scale and the development of adaptation measures.
SYKE stakeholders for the project:
Ministry of the Interior,
Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry,
Department for Rescue Services Centre for Economic Development,
Transport and the Environment in Southwest Finland and
Tapio.
The international website of the whole project EIFFEL.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement Νο 101003518