EO2HEAVEN: Earth Observation and ENVironmental modelling for the mitigation of HEAlth risks

J.F. Esteban1, J. Lorenzo1, J. López1, L. Bernard2, H.-G. Maas2, J. Brauner2

1 Atos Origin, Madrid, Spain

2 Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany

EO2HEAVEN (Earth Observation and Environmental Modelling for the Mitigation of Health Risks) is a research project co-funded by the European Commission as part of the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) Environmental theme. It started on 1st February 2010. The duration of the projects is three years and the allocated European Commission funding is more than Euro 6 million.

EO2HEAVEN contributes to a better understanding of the complex relationships between environmental changes and their impact on human health. The project will monitor changes induced by human activities, with emphasis on atmospheric, river, lake and coastal marine pollution. EO2HEAVEN will follow a multidisciplinary and user-driven approach involving public health stakeholders who will work closely with technology and service providers in both the earth observation and in-situ environmental monitoring domain.

The result of this collaboration will be the design and development of a GIS based upon an open and standards-based Spatial Information Infrastructure (SII) envisaged as a helpful tool for research of human exposure and early detection of potential health endangerments. For this reason the project will develop models to relate environmental data with exposure and health data. The SII will include bridging capabilities at the syntactic and semantic levels to and between environmental and health systems. Health data collections will be studied and new structures for their integration into SII will be described. Also standards for health data collection will be proposed.

Ongoing and recently completed research projects in the ICT (Information and Communication Technologies), environmental and health domains will be studied and used in an integrative approach. In addition EO2HEAVEN will examine the different Earth Observation products, especially those resources available free of charge for the research community, like the imagery from the Landsat satellite programme, which was launched 38 years ago. In order to study the impact of human activity on health the project will take advantage of the availability of this long time-series data combined with its great potential to detect and map environmental variables. For this purpose EO2HEAVEN will also strengthen the integration of remotely sensed and in-situ environmental measurements. The SII therefore facilitates the set-up of observation and decision support systems that rely upon the correlation and fusion of earth observation, in-situ and human health data.

Throughout the life span of the project the stakeholder requirements from three different use cases (in Europe and Southern Africa) will be assessed and the technical solutions proposed by EO2HEAVEN will be evaluated through an iterative process, thus ensuring that the solutions can be applied on a global scale. Specifically the involvement of International Co-operation Partner Countries (ICPC) such as Mozambique and South Africa is an important asset for the project in order to study and understand the complex implications of the climate change for the emergence of infectious diseases. A first use case will be developed in Dresden (Germany) addressing the environment effects on allergies and cardiovascular diseases. A second use case will be located in south Durban industrial basin (South Africa) and will deal mainly with the pollution and respiratory diseases. The third use case will be conducted in Mozambique and will investigate the impact of climatic variables on the outbreak of cholera in Beira.

EO2HEAVEN will open up its pilot implementation to external participation through the creation of an OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) Interoperability Testbed and by initiating a Pilot implementation in response to GEO HE-09-01/02 tasks (Information Systems for Health and Monitoring and Prediction Systems).

EO2HEAVEN will specify and implement the SII as an open architecture based upon international standards and adaptive geospatial web services in alignment with the large-scale initiatives INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe) and GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security). This open approach is considered essential for the sustainability of the project and involves several measures such that all essential specifications of the EO2HEAVEN architecture will be publicly available, all core components of the EO2HEAVEN spatial information infrastructure will be provided as Open Source, and methodological guidelines and tools for the development of additional environment and health applications will be developed. EO2HEAVEN builds upon the results of FP6 and FP7 projects that have already dealt with open and generic architectures for environmental risk management and the integration of sensor networks such as ORCHESTRA (Open Architecture and Spatial Data Infrastructure for Risk Management), SANY (Sensors Anywhere) and GIGAS (GEOSS, INSPIRE, GMES – An Action in Support).

The results of the project will directly address current goals of GEOSS (Global Earth Observation System of Systems) such that the resulting system will be integrated into the GEOSS infrastructure after successful validation already during the course of the project.

Finally, the EO2HEAVEN consortium is composed by a team of partners with long-standing distinguished experience in project management, public health research, EO data provision, analysis and exploitation, distributed system architectures, standardisation, European policy implementation, open source software and outreach activities.