Shortages of freshwater will be one of the most pressing problems in feeding the world this century. To optimize use of available water it is important to distribute it wisely over the various competing interests, in particular agriculture, which is responsible for 70% of all freshwater use. Irrigation is currently often unsustainable, while groundwater reserves are becoming depleted and many places in the world are suffering water shortages. Action is therefore required now to use space and in-situ monitoring systems, to create a better sense of water availability and optimise use across the planet. WaterSENSE will provide water-availability and mapping services for any place in the world at different time and space resolutions, based on integrated Copernicus data, hydrological models and local data. The results of these services will be open access so as to further develop value-adding services. WaterSENSE itself will deliver the essential value-added service of monitoring compliance of local water use against water rights and regulations (‘water auditing’). The first application will be in the multi-climate Murray-Darling Basin in Australia, followed by validation in South Africa and the Netherlands. Consortium partners already provide water-availability and water-auditing services in the latter two countries. Novel research in the project will develop scalable information services, based on advanced big-data processing algorithms, to determine variables such as evapotranspiration, irrigation water use, rainfall and soil moisture, as well as machine learning to allow automatic data processing and reduce uncertainty in the hydrological variables determined. DIAS services for data provision, as well as cloud hosting and processing of computational services, will be developed and implemented. Existing successful partnership models will be refined to ensure service providers in the water value chain achieve healthy business development.

DINOSAR aims to develop Copernicus based algorithms to support smart farming applications that can be used worldwide, clouds, or no clouds. At the moment, most EO based crop monitoring tools are based on optical satellite inputs. In areas with substantial cloud cover the use of these applications is extremely limited. To be able to introduce more sustainable crop management practices, reliable and continuous time series on crop phenology and health throughout the growing season are needed. This will support farmers to match agricultural inputs (fertilisers, pesticides, water) with what the crop actually needs, decreasing their environmental footprint. DINOSAR will do this by integrating the diagnostic power of optical, infrared and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) signals. With the DINOSAR project we intend to kickstart a revolution in EO-based solutions that tackle challenges in agriculture (under clouds) by making full use of the Copernicus infrastructure. We intend to take the existing methodology a step further by designing a multi-sensor operational monitoring method for a single crop (sugarcane) capable of operating on large data volumes, and then extrapolating this approach to practical field cases and to other crops (and geographies) for which the application of EO-based applications has been underexplored. Rather than looking at optical and SAR based data as two parallel signals, we will focus on integrating the two early on in the processing chain. This has not been done before. Sugarcane in Colombia is our initial test-case, but we will not stop there. DINOSAR will also develop a methodology integrating the combined observations from optical, infrared and SAR EO satellites to monitor other crops in other geographies.

AfriCultuReS – Enhancing Food Security in AFRIcan AgriCULTUral Systems with the Support of REmote Sensing - aims to design, implement and demonstrate an integrated agricultural monitoring and early warning system that will support decision making in the field of food security. AfriCultuReS will deliver a broad range of climatic, production, biophysical and economic information, for various regions in Africa. AfriCultuReS will apply geospatial science to sustainable agricultural development, natural resource management, biodiversity conservation, and poverty alleviation in Africa. AfriCultuReS, supported by the GEO Secretariat, will involve all key players of AfriGEOSS, GEOGLAM, SIGMA, ARTEMIS, African Drought Observatory and other initiatives as well as partners representing the diversity of African agricultural systems, in an effort to push forward the services provided by current systems, with innovative fusion of data from multiple sources (EO, in-situ, citizen-based crowdsourcing, climate services and weather, crop models) in a vertical manner. Crop yield and biomass prediction models will be enhanced through the fusion of EO data and climate models, emphasizing the use of the complementary sensors of the EU Sentinels constellation. Geospatial products will be combined in a spatial Decision Support System (DSS) to enrich decision making and risk assessment. The geo component of the DSS will be compliant with the GEO’s interoperability standards, allowing its integration with the current services of the GEOSS Common Infrastructure. The African partners and collaborating networks will be essential for local training and promoting further use of the project tools. Social innovation will be used to increase the number of involved stakeholders and to boost the flow of information in a user-friendly manner. The final target will be to produce a web tool that will support early decision making for the stakeholders of African food production.