News and Events

ImagineS Annual Review Meeting on 4th December 2013 in Brussels

The meeting has a twofold objective: 1) check that the project is on time; 2) see whether it needs to adapt the work plan for the next 2 years and check the project is still in line with the EC expectations.

Besides REA and its appointed reviewer, Dr. C. Atzberger from BOKU Vienna, representatives of the Copernicus Unit of DG Entr and of JRC as technical coordinator of the Copernicus Global Land service attended the meeting.

ImagineS partners have presented the progress of the work, and the achievements of the first year related to the retrieval methodologies of biophysical variables, crop mapping and Land Data Assimilation System. The current status of the LAI/FAPAR/FCover processing line using PROBA-V 333m data is one month late comparing to the planning since the tests with true data did not started yet because the nominal PROBA-V data are available from 3^rd December only. However, this should not delay the start of the near real time demonstration production in the Copernicus Global Land Service still planned in May 2014.

It has been identified that the project is really borderline with the launch date of the Sentinels satellite. There is a risk that no true Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3 data are available before the end of the project (February 2016). It will be necessary to update the work plan and take mitigation measures as soon as the launch dates are known.

The user uptake has been discussed on the basis of utility assessment proposals made by 4 institutions (Agri-Food Canada, INTA in Argentina, U. Monash in Australia, and U. de San Marcos in Peru). It has been recommended to focus first on stakeholders, including NGO, of the agricultural community, and, in second, on downstream sector (like SMEs) acting outside Europe.

The next project milestone is the 2^nd Progress Meeting which will be held on 13^th -14^th March in Paris hosted by INRA.