The mission of EARTHONE is to address the pressing issue of preserving and enhancing Earth's natural terrestrial GHG sinks by understanding how different drivers, including socio-economic, demographic, and physical constraints affect GHG fluxes. The project adopts a unique and interdisciplinary approach, integrating state-of-the-art data-driven technology with regional context (with a special focus on the most vulnerable areas in south and Mediterranean Europe including Spain, Greece, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia and North Macedonia) through living labs to offer effective multi-target solutions and guideline to all stakeholders in LULUCF topics. For this goal, EARTHONE will develop:
1. And concurrently implement a complete multi-Tier methodology through effective land management activities for sustainable agriculture and forestry towards the optimization of GHG fluxes and promoting the resilience of habitats towards climate change adaptation in the LULUCF sector. This methodology incorporates procedures for adequate risk-based management and a complete evaluation and validation framework.
2. An entire end-to-end framework, supporting the evidence collection for GHG inventory, at vulnerable plots in Europe to quantify improvements in the activities performed. This system is compatible with the European Green Deal Dataspace normative and guidelines. This approach tackles the challenges of data integration and governance to support the development of a set of tools, that will exploit external data sources including, but not limited to, (1) satellite imagery and products from NASA e.g. Landsat, Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), and European Space Agency (ESA) e.g. Sentinels and other datasets from the COPERNICUS initiative; (2) meteorological agencies, other sources: Spanish Meteorology Agency AEMET, Hellenic National Meteorological Service HNMS, European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts ECMWF, Bonn conference, IPCC reports, etc., (3) environmental data including European Environmental Agency, International Soil Reference and Information Centre, European Soil Information System, Natura Habitats, Biodiversity Information System, highlighting the CORINE and HR-VPP services.
3. A suite of cutting-edge biophysical, statistical, and AI models will assist landowners, environmental experts, and policymakers in making optimized decisions backed by scientific evidence. These models encompass tailored tools for global climate predictions via land use management, integrating GHG considerations, and regional climate modeling through sensitivity analysis to ensure effective management under future conditions.
4. A set of local actions to gather evidence and recommendations with the objective of scaling up to minimize socio-economic and environmental risks. This evidence will be used as a basis for providing guidelines for the adaptation of national and supranational environmental policies.
Organisations
- Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC)
- Scientific Departments (ITC-SCI)
- ITC-TECH (ITC-SCI-TECH)