ERA-PLANET Kickoff Meeting

IIASA's Ecosystem Services and Management program is part of the ERA-PLANET Consortium which is made up of the most important public entities involved in GEOSS and the Earth Observation programmes across Europe. February 16-17 is the kick off meeting for the ERA-PLANET project.

Rationale & Objectives:

Earth Observation data is being collected and managed by a plethora of instruments and systems at local, national, regional, and global level. Most of them are used for scientific research with limited sharing across different domains; quite often they (or the products derived from them) are not utilized to support decision makers. Impediments include: technological, legal, political, economical, and organizational barriers.

Earth observations data are essential to improve our understanding of the complex interactions within and across ecosystems and the different humans driving changes in our planet.

The overarching goals of ERA-PLANET are:

•  to coordinate resources pooling from national and international research programmes, by lowering present sharing barriers, for an effective transfer of environmental knowledge for the benefit of scientists, policy makers, business and society;
•  to facilitate the advance of remotely-sensed and in-situ network observations as well as technological integration and synergy for better understanding our environment and contribute to: Smart cities and Resilient societies; Resource efficiency and Environmental management; Global changes and Environmental treaties; Polar areas and Natural resources;
•  to usefully harness non-authoritative observations, including Citizens science;
•  to reinforce the European role in GEOSS;
•  to provide a re-search and innovation component to the Copernicus programme.

Last edited: 16 February 2016