THE MICS project brings together a transdisciplinary team to address a scientific and policy priority area where citizen science has the potential to promote a paradigm shift. Nature-based solutions (NBSs) are actions to protect, sustainably manage and restore natural or modified ecosystems that address societal challenges and provide human well-being. NBSs have increasingly become policy and planning objectives, but major knowledge gaps in NBSs science have hindered their implementation and acceptance. This is largely due to a lack of locally specific information about the influence of: climate, location, condition and management on NBS function and impact. Furthermore, the sustainability of NBSs often depends on the perceptions and needs of stakeholders, including user groups, local communities, conservation bodies, farmers, land managers, policy makers and practitioners. Due to their systemic complexity and embedding in local context, NBSs offer a unique potential for citizen science to make a major contribution. The MICS project will support NBS research by developing strategies and tools to evaluate impacts on science and society resulting from the integration of citizen science. These tools will foster citizen science approaches that increase both scientific knowledge, and how scientific evidence is taken up by communities and policy makers. MICS will use novel impact-assessment metrics and instruments that measure costs and benefits of citizen science in relation to the NBSs, with particular attention in the domains of society; democracy; the economy; NBS science, and citizen scientists. These instruments will be grounded in a comprehensive conceptual framework and integrated into an open platform following rigorous validation in key pilot sites along a West-East EU axis. This will test the applicability of the MICS impact-assessment tools in regions with differing opportunities and constraints for NBSs, and with different levels of citizen science uptake.

The underlying approach within xR4DRAMA is to create and enhance this situation awareness for those who are – remotely as well as directly – engaged in handling disasters, man made crises or public events or the aftermaths thereof in remote locations. The groups usually involved in such events range from first responders, local authorities and security forces, to media companies and event planners. They all need to dive into the given situation, either by planning or executing a mission connected to the event at hand. In xR4DRAMA the proof of concept will focus on first responders and media companies before extending the use cases to other domains. xR4DRAMA aims at enhancing situation awareness through, especially, XR technologies in order to: • facilitate the sourcing of all relevant information needed to plan necessary actions; • create an „as if on site“ experience of an environment (e.g. in VR) to anticipate the planned event or an incident as thoroughly as possible; • create a joint understanding of an environment (a “distributed situation awareness”) to be shared by team members, allowing for smoother communication and consultation; • provide the possibility to continuously update the representation of the location (e.g. in VR) during the evolving incident/event in order to understand and potentially re-assess consequences of specific decisions. xR4DRAMA will use XR technologies and integrated systems fed with live sensor data in order to anticipate situations as accurately as possible, so that decisions can be made as informed and efficient as possible. xR4DRAMA aims at creating a tool for multiple domains, from outdoor media production planning to disaster management. It can be used remotely and on site for an augmented and shared perception of a given situation, in order to facilitate more efficient and resource-saving planning as well as a frictionless implementation of the planned action.

The rising trend in citizen science has led to the development of Citizen Observatories (COs) for environmental monitoring, which have been supported in FP7 and H2020. To improve the coordination between existing COs and related regional, European and international activities, the WeObserve Coordination and Support Action will tackle three key challenges that face COs: awareness, acceptability and sustainability. The WeObserve mission is to create a sustainable ecosystem of COs that can systematically address these identified challenges and help move citizen science into the mainstream. The WeObserve approach will apply several key instruments to target, connect and coordinate relevant stakeholders. The first is to develop and foster five communities of practice to strengthen the current knowledge base surrounding COs. Topics will include citizen engagement, the value of COs for governance and CO data interoperability. In co-creating this knowledge base, CO practitioners will have a platform to effectively share best practices and avoid duplication. The second will expand the geographical reach of the knowledge base to different target groups via toolkits, a Massive Open Online Course, capacity development roadshows and an Open Data Exploitation Challenge, to strengthen the uptake of CO-powered science by public authorities and SMEs. A third mechanism will forge links with GEOSS and Copernicus to demonstrate how COs can complement the EU’s Earth Observation monitoring framework. The WeObserve consortium brings together the current H2020 COs (Ground Truth 2.0, GROW, LandSense, Scent) who will actively open up the CO landscape through wide ranging networks, users and stakeholders, including ECSA, GEOSS and Copernicus to foster social innovation opportunities. The WeObserve approach and outcomes have the potential to create a step-change in EO innovation and make COs a valuable component of managing environmental challenges and empowering resilient communities.

Earth Observation data access through the Copernicus data distributor systems has paved the way to monitor changes on Earth, using Sentinel data. One of the main objectives of EOPEN is to fuse Sentinel data with multiple, heterogeneous and big data sources, to improve the monitoring capabilities of the future EO downstream sector. Additionally, the involvement of mature ICT solutions in the Earth Observation sector shall address major challenges in effectively handling and disseminating Copernicus-related information to the wider user community, beyond the EU borders. To achieve the aforementioned goals, EOPEN will fuse Copernicus big data content with other observations from non-EO data, such as weather, environmental and social media information, aiming at interactive, real-time and user-friendly visualisations and decisions from early warning notifications. The fusion is also done at the semantic level, to provide reasoning mechanisms and interoperable solutions, through the semantic linking of information. Processing of large streams of data is based on open-source and scalable algorithms in change detection, event detection, data clustering, which are built on High Performance Computing infrastructures. Alongside this enhanced data fusion, a new innovative, overarching Joint Decision & Information Governance architecture will be combined with the technical solution to assist decision making and visual analytics in EOPEN. Apart from EO product-oriented data management activities, EOPEN also exploits user-oriented feedback, tagging, tracking of interactions with other EOPEN users. EOPEN will be demonstrated in real use case scenarios in flood risk monitoring, food security and climate change monitoring.

In every disaster and crisis, incident time is the enemy, and getting accurate information about the scope, extent, and impact of the disaster is critical to creating and orchestrating an effective disaster response and recovery effort. The main goal of beAWARE is to provide support in all the phases of an emergency incident. More specifically, we propose an integrated solution to support forecasting, early warnings, transmission and routing of the emergency data, aggregated analysis of multimodal data and management the coordination between the first responders and the authorities. Our intention is to rely on platforms, theories and methodologies that are already used for disaster forecasting and management and add the elements that are necessary to make them working efficiently and in harm under the same objective. The overall context for beAWARE lies in the domain of situational awareness and command and control (C2). The first phase concerns the forecast of the extreme condition and the relevant preparations. Once a disaster occurs, an initial assessment needs to be conducted as soon as possible to determine the scope, geographical distribution, and scale of the incident. Situational awareness means being able to accurately determine what has happened, what is happening now, and what will come next, all in order to plan and coordinate the most effective response possible with the resources available. This observation phase will lead to an orientation phase suggesting both an individual as well as collective “cognition” orientation to data that is sensed and communicated. Once orientation to the data (or the lack of it) occurs then a decision is made, ultimately resulting is the final step, which is “act”. The crisis management center is always striving or struggling to gain a sense of what is reality to be able to feel that he or she can make a decision that is the "best possible" given the circumstances.