Through the SKIES project, the consortium partners will provide PhD and 1st year postdoctoral researchers in the field of astronomy with a new set of skills integrating open science, innovation and entrepreneurship, thereby equipping them for a career that allows them to fulfill their potential and contribute to society and economy. A Train the Trainer programme builds the capacity of the teaching staff, so that they have the training and tools to continue the programme beyond the life of the project. Online training will be made available to support the partner as well as other organisations interested to run similar courses.

Biodiversity is under severe pressure due to a myriad of problems, including but not limited to habitat fragmentation, overexploitation, climate change, pollution, invasive species and hunting. Changes in land and sea use can lead to conflict situations with production animals and/or human communities (human-wildlife conflict). The exploitation of natural resources brings with it illegal activities: poaching of species of flora and fauna that have a high value on the (black) market, trading of rare and exotic animals and plants and setting fire to forestry and nature areas to force land-use designation changes to agriculture or commercial uses. To ensure that ecosystems are healthy, resilient to climate change and rich in biodiversity to keep delivering the essential range of services, we need better understanding of why and where biodiversity is declining and what the key triggers are. We propose a model-driven and continuous form of ecosystem monitoring. By assessing not only numbers of species and state, but also the modelled ecological and anthropogenic processes within an ecosystem, we are able to find cause-effect relations and improve our monitoring models based on retrofits and simulations to understand changes even better. The models (Digital Twins), are thus a means for learning and the creation of context to translate environmental observations into facts and actionable information (intelligence) for site managers and policy makers. As almost all pressures on biodiversity are man-induced, we combine the domains of ecology and forensic science. This novel approach gives us access to robust scientific methods to detect and recognise (traces of) human (illegal) activities that negatively affect the environment. We will make use of remote sensing & data science (e.g AI, semantics). To ensure that theory, models and practice reinforce each other, we use an iterative approach, including many demonstrations and field-tests to gain feedback and maximize impact.

Unprecedented availability of free-to-access satellite data from the Copernicus programme has started to transform approaches to the assessment, monitoring and sustainable management of our aquatic environments. However, whilst the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service delivers the first generation of inland water quantity and quality products, other directly related products are fragmented across other services (e.g. EMS, C3S, CMEMS, CAMS, CIS). R&D capabilities have rapidly expanded through H2020 and ESA projects working on inland water challenges, but lack of coordination has led to a fragmented approach to evolving the service components and some confusion in a potentially broad user community. Thus, this expansion has not been matched by uptake of these products by decision makers, monitoring agencies, industry or the wider public. Water-ForCE will co-create a Roadmap for the development of the next phase of Copernicus Inland Water Services with the space sector, research community, policy, industry and third sector. The Roadmap will be benchmarked against community requirements, recommending services that should be delivered centrally by Copernicus and innovation opportunities that are better suited for business and research development. The Roadmap will also provide the strategy to ensure effective uptake of water-related services by end users, further support the implementation of relevant directives and policies and evidence policy development. This cross-disciplinary approach will align in situ and remote observation as this is essential to furthering the exploitation of operational observation platforms. A strategy to integrate in situ networks will be defined, integrating approaches to product validation and filling observation gaps and thus strengthen user confidence. Technical requirements for the future Copernicus sensors will also be specified for optimal inland water monitoring needs and future service development.

ILIAD builds on the assets resulting from two decades of investments in policies and infrastructures for the blue economy and aims at establishing an interoperable, data-intensive, and cost-effective Digital Twin of the Ocean (DTO). It capitalizes on the explosion of new data provided by many different earth sources, advanced computing infrastructures (cloud computing, HPC, Internet of Things, Big Data, social networking, and more) in an inclusive, virtual/augmented, and engaging fashion to address all Earth Data challenges. It will contribute towards a sustainable ocean economy as defined by the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Ocean, a hub for global, multistakeholder co-operation. The ILIAD DTO will fuse a large volume of diverse data, in a semantically rich and data agnostic approach to enable simultaneous communication with real world systems and models. Ontologies and a standard style-layered descriptor will facilitate semantic information and intuitive discovery of underlying information and knowledge to provide a seamless experience. The combination of geovisualisation, immersive visualization and virtual or augmented reality allows users to explore, synthesize, present, and analyze the underlying geospatial data in an interactive manner. The enabling technology of the ILIAD DTO will contribute to the implementation of the EU?s Green Deal and Digital Strategy and to the achievement of the UN Ocean Decade's outcomes and Sustainable Development Goals. To realize its potential, ILIAD DTO will follow the System of Systems approach, integrating all existing EU Earth Observing and Modelling Digital Infrastructures and Facilities To promote additional applications through ILIAD DTO, the partners will create the ILIAD Marketplace. Like an app store, providers will use the ILIAD Marketplace to distribute apps, plug-ins, interfaces, raw data, citizen science data, synthesized information, and value-adding services derived from the ILIAD DTO.