The NextGEOSS project, valued at €10 million, has been selected by the European Commission to provide the European hub for EO data distribution. NextGEOSS (Next Generation GEOSS for Business & Innovation) will be the European contribution to the global system being put in place by GEO, providing access to a large number of data sources, including the Sentinel satellites, Copernicus core services, and others. It will implement a federated data hub for access and exploitation of Earth Observation data, including tools for data-mining, discovery, and exploitation. The NextGEOSS concept revolves around providing the data and resources to the user communities, together with Cloud resources, seamlessly connected to provide an integrated ecosystem for supporting applications.
The NextGEOSS consortium is composed of 27 institutions in total, including leading European companies, research institutions and universities, active in many GEO-related activities and other European, ESA and international projects. The consortium covers 13 European countries: Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
The Faculty ITC, University of Twente, and Alterra role is to demonstrate the value of a European data hub for the creation of RS-EBVs (Remote sensing-Essential Biodiversity Variables). The GEOhub for EBVs will link the key policy/user network groups (GEOBON, CBD, and IPBES) with the space agencies (via CEOS). ITC and Alterra will demonstrate the use of the European data hub in terms ofhigh-resolution RS-EBVs for habitat monitoring in order to support the European Environment Agency (EEA) and its Topic Centre for Biological Diversity (ETCBD).
Staff involved in the project include Prof Andrew Skidmore, Dr. Roshanak Darvishzadeh, Dr Tiejun Wang fro ITC as well as Dr Sander Mucher and Dr Stefan Hennekens from Alterra.