E2mC aims at demonstrating the technical and operational feasibility of the integration of social media analysis and crowdsourced information within both the Mapping and Early Warning Components of Copernicus Emergency Management Service (EMS). The Project will develop a prototype of a new EMS Service Component (Copernicus Witness), designed to exploit social media analysis and crowdsourcing capabilities to generate a new Product of the EMS Portfolio. The purpose of the new Copernicus Witness Service Component is to improve the timeliness and accuracy of geo-spatial information provided to Civil Protection authorities, on a 24/7 basis, during the overall crisis management cycle and, particularly, in the first hours immediately after the event. This will result in an early confirmation of alerts from running Early Warning Systems as well as first rapid impact assessment from the field. The technological enabler of the Copernicus Witness is the innovative and scalable Social&Crowd (S&C) Platform, developed by E2mC. Heterogeneous social media data streams (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram,… and different data: text, image, video, …) will be analysed and sparse crowdsourcing communities will be federated (crisis specific as Tomnod, HOT, SBTF and generic as Crowdcrafting, EpiCollect,…). Two demonstration loops will validate the usefulness of Copernicus Witness and the S&C Platform suitability to allow EC to evaluate possible Copernicus EMS evolution options. E2mC will perform demonstrations within realistic and operational scenarios designed by the Users involved within the Project (Civil Protection Authorities and Humanitarian Aid operators, including their volunteer teams) and by the current Copernicus EMS Operational Service Providers that are part of the E2mC Consortium. The involvement of social media and crowdsourcing communities will foster the engagement of a large number of people in supporting crisis management; many more citizens will become aware of Copernicus.

Mediterranean Rainfed Agrosystems (MRAs) provide various environmental and economic services of importance such as food production, preservation of employment and local knowhow, downstream water delivery or mitigation of rural exodus. These services have progression margins, thus making investments in such agrosystems highly profitable. In the meantime, expected climate change combined with demography and market pressures threaten MRA future abilities to satisfy the aforementioned services. In the context of mitigating the pressures induced by global change, ALMIRA aims to explore the modulation of landscape mosaics within MRAs to optimize landscape services. Following recommendations from think-tank IAASTD (2008), significant advances are expected by reasoning spatial organizations of land uses and cropping systems. ALMIRA proposes a threefold conceptualization of landscape mosaics as i) networks of natural and anthropogenic elements that result from biophysical and socio-economic processes within a resource governance catchment, ii) structures that impact landscape fluxes from the agricultural field to the catchment extent, with consequences on the resulting functions and services, and iii) a possible lever for managing agricultural catchments by compromising on agricultural production and on preservation of soil and water resources. To explore this new lever, ALMIRA proposes to design, implement and test a new Integrated Assessment Modelling approach that explicitly i) includes innovations and action means into prospective scenarii for landscape evolutions, and ii) addresses landscape mosaics and processes of interest from the agricultural field to the resource governance catchment. This requires tackling methodological challenges in relation to i) the design of spatially explicit landscape evolution scenarii, ii) the coupling of biophysical processes related to agricultural catchment hydrology, iii) the digital mapping of landscape properties and iv) the economic assessment of the landscape services. The new Integrated Assessment Modelling approach is implemented and tested within three catchments located in France, Morocco and Tunisia. Beyond the obtaining of significant advances in the aforementioned methodological domains, and the understanding of landscape functioning and services for the considered catchments, outcomes are expected to help in revisiting former recommendations at the levels of agricultural field and resource governance catchment, and in identifying new levers that improve MRA management at the intermediate level of landscape mosaics. ALMIRA gathers French, Moroccan and Tunisian researchers involved in a large range of scientific disciplines: hydrology, physical geography, climatology, pedology, remote sensing, spatial statistics, agronomy, agro-economy, sociology, agricultural and environmental economy. One of the major challenges of the project is to make all these disciplines converging towards a reproducible transdisciplinary approach.

The EOMonDis Project aims to improve the operationality of tropical forest products/services in order to better access the funding for the UNFCCC REDD+ policy which is a large market segment for the EO-industry in Europe. Additionally, national forest policy programmes and Zero Deforestation programmes also require forest monitoring systems with assessment of forest/non-forest information using disturbance indicators for deforestation and degradation as well as changes in above ground woody biomass. In order to provide operational forest monitoring services for the humid and dry forests several technical challenges have to be overcome. For example, the occurrence of persistent cloud conditions in tropical regions impact the effective use of optical EO data. Seasonal effects in dry forest ecosystems (leaf-fall) combined with limited availability of multi-seasonal EO data coverages also influence the quality and cost effectiveness of the monitoring systems. These situations will change drastically with the Sentinel constellations which provide the high frequency, high resolution optical and radar data required. Therefore, the overarching goal of EOMonDis is to develop innovative and cost-effective EO-based methods to address the technical challenges for tropical forest monitoring which will also fully utilize the comprehensive information provided by the dense time series of optical and SAR satellite data of Sentinel-1 and 2. The methods developed will be tested on study sites selected to represent the wide range of variety in the tropical biomes, in Malawi, Cameroon, Gabon and Vietnam. Users from these countries will be consulted for consolidation of the service requirements, validation of the services, the customization and improvement of the services to fit into their workflows. Based on a market analysis and service validation by the User a 3year business concept will be developed to ensure that there is income generation after the project completion.