LandSTATSeo

Starting point / motivation

Copernicus can help to meet the current and overwhelming demand for bulk environmental information at the planetary scale. Aside from its technical attributes, EO is part of a wider technological revolution as society moves into the Information Age, an age defined by Big Data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence.

Capturing these technologies and using them in support the UN SDGs will be a corner stone in the achievement of Agenda 2030. The full potential of these data sets are still untapped as they require massive storage and processing infrastructure as well as complex analytical methods.

EODC’s infrastructure can handle large scale data processing and integrate these processes into daily workflows, but EODC currently lacks user-enabled onboarding to its services (i.e. cross-platform processing capabilities, scalability functions and robust scheduling services).

Contents and goals

LandSTATSeo has two primary objectives.

• Initially, to further develop the EODC platform to allow user enabled on-boarding to specialised EO service solutions.
• Secondly, to support and empower national statistical offices to access ready-to-use statistical information on land dynamics derived through the Copernicus satellite data, assess the impact within current data gathering workflows and motivate the operational implementation of EO derived statistical products for their reporting obligations on national and international (i.e. SDG reporting) level.

Methods

Specifically, the project intends to develop and verify:

• IT solutions for end user-based activated API services, and
• a suite of statistical information streams on land cover dynamics, developed with, and for, non-EO experts, that can be readily integrated in to public authority workflows to significantly enhance reporting capacities, with a specific focus on SDG obligations.

The services will be based on:

1. open-source Copernicus data sets stored and accessible within the Austrian Data Cube archive hosted by EODC,
2. state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms that will be boosted through variants of a completely new multi-dimensional land cover dynamic indices developed by GeoVille crop growth and yield models and crop stress indicators provided by BOKU,
3. extending the tools implemented at EODC for collaborative cloud computing, and
4. development of a user-friendly, open source, low barrier, interface (i.e. API 2 spreadsheet and R).

In LandSTATSeo we bring an inexperienced EO user, Statistik Austria (STAT), directly into collaboration with a team comprising of partners with a proven track record of EO R&D and operational service provision.

The partnership with STAT will enable real world demand cases in Austria to be addressed, assessed and demonstrated. Within the use cases, STAT will integrate existing statistical information as well as existing geo data to extract meaningful statistical information from the suite of generated products and validate the derived information.

Furthermore, LandSTATSeo will focus on parameters that contribute to the monitoring of SDGs and therefore support Austria’s reporting and monitoring capacities.

Expected results

The results of the project will be summarized into a road map which: 

• reports on EO products and their impact on existing tasks,
• recommends on the incorporation of EO data and products into STATs operational and future activities with regard to SDG reporting, and
• provide the technological capacity to roll-out Copernicus based statistical services for SDG reporting across Europe.

A preliminary business projection based on conservative scenarios estimates such service 10-year’s direct Net present value of almost € 22 MIO (realising substantial number of new employments) for the involved partners (Chapter 3.1 Market Outlook).

Coordinator

EODC Earth Observation Data Centre for Water Resources Monitoring GmbH

Project partner

• GeoVille GmbH
• Statistik Austria
• The University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences

EODC Earth Observation Data Centre for Water Resources Monitoring GmbH
Dr. Christian Briese
Franz-Grill-Straße 9
A-1030 Vienna