TERRA
An InTelligEnt PlatfoRm for IntegRating ClimAte Services
An intelligent platform integrating Copernicus services with Artificial Intelligence, Digital Twins and data fusion to tackle water-related risks.
Context
Water-related risks rank among the top five global risks and, beyond being an environmental issue, they also pose an economic and social threat.
Water, in fact, is a critical infrastructure: according to Water Europe (the European technology platform for the water sector), around 90% of economic activities and 75% of jobs worldwide depend on it.
Agriculture, energy production, manufacturing, and the food, textile and digital sectors all rely on water being available in the right quantity and quality: floods and droughts disrupt its availability, while pollution and the saline intrusion driven by sea-level rise render it unusable even where it is present. A risk affecting water therefore becomes, inevitably, a cross-cutting economic risk.
The Copernicus Programme already provides tools to forecast, assess and analyse these risk domains and to support emergency management, yet they remain underutilised by industry and policymakers because of significant technical integration challenges: the data exists, but bringing it together, harmonising it and making it readable for non-specialists is difficult and calls for specific expertise.
- 90%
- Of economic activities depend on water
- 75%
- Of jobs worldwide depend on water
The project
TERRA (An InTelligEnt PlatfoRm for IntegRating ClimAte Services) is a Horizon Europe initiative that aims to bridge this gap. Within a scalable platform, it integrates the Copernicus services with advanced technologies (Artificial Intelligence, Digital Twins and data fusion).
On this foundation, TERRA delivers innovative services (individual analytical capabilities) and product chains (complete solutions that combine several services to tackle a specific environmental challenge end-to-end), addressing coastline detection, coastal erosion modelling and forecasting, flood risk assessment and mitigation, and water pollution assessment.
To show that this approach works in practice, TERRA tests its services against the water-related risks described above in three real-world demonstrators: water contamination in coastal areas (Fthiotida, Greece), the monitoring of harbour activities (Gdańsk, Poland) and coastal change through a Digital Twin (Scotland).
TERRA is delivered by a multidisciplinary European consortium of nine partners (universities, SMEs and research institutions) comprising the University of Thessaly, Blue Dot Solutions, the University of Glasgow, BI2S, InCites Consulting, Venaka Treleaf, CITE, the International Space University and MEEO.
- 3
- Real-world demonstrators: Greece, Poland, Scotland
- 9
- European partners in the consortium
MEEO’s role
Within TERRA, MEEO contributes to the system architecture and facilitates geospatial data access and visualisation through the following activities:
- Data and intellectual property rights management. Defining the rules for data governance, protection and secure sharing, including intellectual property rights (IPR), to ensure compliance within the consortium.
- Requirements and architecture. Analysing technical challenges and user needs, aligning TERRA and Copernicus services, and defining the overall platform architecture.
- Data collection and visual analytics. Developing the protocols and interfaces for data collection and an advanced visual analytics platform that turns data into interactive visualisations for analysis.
- Integration and testing. Integrating and testing all technical components, with performance optimised for end users and in line with the latest DevOps practices.
A central goal for MEEO is to build a unified interface that brings together, in a single point of access, the visualisation of the data produced by the three demonstrators, drawing on its experience in open OGC standards and in delivering heterogeneous geospatial data through web-based interfaces.
Roadmap
36 months, January 2025 – December 2027. Phases 2 and 3 run in parallel; the cross-cutting band spans the entire project duration.
- Requirements & architecture (M01–M24, 2025–2026): use cases, user requirements, TERRA–Copernicus alignment, overall platform architecture.
- Intelligent platform development (M03–M30, 2025–2027): data collection, Big Data module, AI models, satellite image processing, Digital Twins, visual analytics.
- Integration & validation (M07–M36, 2025–2027): services testing and platform integration, product chain integration, validation, replicability analysis.
- Demonstrators (M13–M36, 2026–2027): water contamination (Greece), harbour activity (Poland), coastal change Digital Twin (Scotland), user feedback.
Cross-cutting: coordination, outreach & impact (M01–M36, whole project)
Project coordination, data & IPR management, dissemination, stakeholder engagement, sustainability and policy briefs.