TED4LAT is a Coordination and Support Action proposal targeting the overarching objective of the call HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ACCESS-03-01: Twinning to reach high international standards in research and innovation in Latvia. It will be implemented by twinning two prominent research institutions in France, Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, and in Italy, Politecnico di Torino, with three widening Latvian Universities (Liepaja University, Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences, and Riga Technical University). The Baltic Open Solutions Center, a Latvian SME, joins the endeavor as a living-lab application partner. Latvian universities barely reach international standards in strategic areas such as the foundation and last-generation ICT science and technology like Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, and Dynamic Systems Modeling. In these sectors, Latvia is lagging behind compared to other European countries and aims at bridging the knowledge gap. To achieve the objectives, a research component of the work plan aims at targeting universities, incubators, research centers, NCPs. An intertwined set of Communication and Support activities aim at reaching the broadest community of junior and senior researchers, Twinning project’s teams and other EC initiatives, Latvian policy and decision makers. A common research agenda will address scientific challenges related to the use of satellite data for environmental applications, as accompanying measures, computational infrastructure upgrades, doctoral schools, workshops, exchange visits and seminars will be implemented. The outcomes will be critically important to increase the ability and capacity of Latvian universities to carry out large-scale and high-quality research in the aforementioned domains. Capacity building will result in the emergence of Latvian universities' excellence for proactively cooperating in EU research programmes over the coming decade.

COMUNIDAD aims at developing, testing, and implementing a framework that will make use of Copernicus data from agriculture, forestry and rural development in Chile and Colombia. It will develop solutions integrated on the COMUNIDAD platform with different sources of data. The COMUNIDAD Platform will be important base for the use of EGNSS and sharing of expertise with public and private entities from the target countries to introduce EU-space based applications and to use of Copernicus data, to develop jointly algorithms, services and products, which serve local user needs. The interaction with each Pilot Application in Chile and Colombia will feed to long-term policy strategy development, aiming at bringing about the transition into the new paradigm of sustainable agriculture and forestry growth. The combined use of EGNSS and Copernicus to develop innovative downstream applications combining positing navigation and timing with Earth observation services will be an essential part of the COMUNIDAD development through pilot applications in Chile and Colombia with the direct involvement of regional end users, decision makers and support organisations. This approach is not only demonstrating the possibilities of potential transfer of the results and addressing the potential barriers, but as well introducing the added value for developing new markets, information sharing, open access and transparency. The platform is combining existing components and services for new target regions where potential for utilization is expected. The COMUNIDAD will address 4 main Scientific Objectives via 6 WPs. The cooperation of 9 partners is envisaged, from them 5 are from Chile and Colombia and 4 from EU.

To unleash the full potential of IoT, realizing the digital society and flourishing innovations in application domains such as eHealth, smart city, intelligent transport systems, and smart manufacturing, it is critical to facilitate the creation and operation of trustworthy Smart IoT Systems. Since smart IoT systems typically operate in a changing and often unpredictable environment, the ability of these systems to continuously evolve and adapt to their new environment is decisive to ensure and increase their trustworthiness, quality and user experience. The DevOps movement advocates a set of software engineering best practices and tools, to ensure Quality of Service whilst continuously evolving complex systems and foster agility, rapid innovation cycles, and ease of use . Therefore, DevOps has been widely adopted in the software industry . However, there is no complete DevOps support for trustworthy smart IoT systems today. The main technical goal of ENACT is to develop novel IoT platform enablers to: i) Enable DevOps in the realm of trustworthy smart IoT systems, and enrich it with novel concepts for end-to-end security and privacy, resilience and robustness strengthening trustworthiness, taking into account the challenges related to “collaborative” actuation and actuation conflicts. ii) Facilitate the smooth integration of these to leverage DevOps for existing and new IoT platforms and approaches (e.g., FIWARE, SOFIA, and TelluCloud). This will be accomplished by evolving current DevOps methods and techniques to support the agile development and operation of smart IoT systems, and provide a set of novel mechanisms to ensure quality assurance and trustworthiness, such as actuation conflict handling, continuous testing and delivery across IoT, edge and cloud spaces and end to end security and privacy management. Through this ENACT will provide a DevOps framework for smart IoT Systems

FATIMA addresses effective and efficient monitoring and management of agricultural resources to achieve optimum crop yield and quality in a sustainable environment. It covers both ends of the scale relevant for food production, viz., precision farming and the perspective of a sustainable agriculture in the context of integrated agri-environment management. It aims at developing innovative and new farm capacities that help the intensive farm sector optimize their external input (nutrients, water) management and use, with the vision of bridging sustainable crop production with fair economic competitiveness. Our comprehensive strategy covers five interconnected levels: a modular technology package (based on the integration of Earth observation and wireless sensor networks into a webGIS), a field work package (exploring options of improving soil and input management), a toolset for multi-actor participatory processes, an integrated multi-scale economic analysis framework, and an umbrella policy analysis set based on indicator-, accounting- and footprint approach. FATIMA addresses and works with user communities (farmers, managers, decision makers in the farm and agribusiness sector) at scales ranging from farm, over irrigation scheme or aquifer, to river-basins. It will provide them with maps of fertilizer and water requirements (to feed into precision farming machinery), crop water consumption and a range of further products for sustainable cropping management supported with innovative water-energy footprint frameworks. All information will be integrated in leading-edge participatory spatial online decision-support systems. The innovative FATIMA service concept considers the economic, environmental, technical, social, and political dimensions in an integrated way. FATIMA will be implemented and demonstrated in 8 pilot areas representative of key European intensive crop production systems in Spain, Italy, Greece, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Austria, France, Turkey.

SIEUSOIL will design, implement and test a shared China-EU Web Observatory platform that will provide Open Linked Data to monitor status and threats of soil and assist in decision making for sustainable support of agro-ecosystem functions, in view of the projected climate change. The Observatory platform will through customizable modules support the wise management of soil at field level and will provide showcase of good practices on soil management both for EU and China. The final target will be to support sustainable management of soil, increase land productivity sustainably, reduce crop yield variability across time and space, and support the policy formulation process. Innovative practices and tools will be tested in SIEUSOIL and their impact will be assessed for improved soil fertility and land suitability.