Forest Flux partner, Matthias Dees, UNIQUE land use and forestry, participated and contributed on October 8th 2019 at the event organized by the European Commission “Paving the way for Horizon Europe in the Earth Observation (EO) downstream sector: Fostering a competitive and sustainable European EO downstream workshop”.
The event included both presentations and a debate about the importance of Earth Observation data for the EU economic sector structured in three sessions: i) opportunities and barriers for market penetration under H2020 programme framework, ii) commercial exploitation of space-based solutions and iii) expectations from Horizon Europe.
On behalf of Forest Flux, Matthias Dees gave a presentation on “How can the regulatory framework underpin the commercial exploitation of space based solutions in the domain Forest management, experiences and suggestions from the perspective of the project Forest Flux.”
Matthias Dees emphasized three points that need attention:
(1) In many regulatory frameworks the formal acceptance is a challenge as they do not consider EO services adequately.
(2) Competition with services offered by governmental agencies is challenging for commercially offered services.
(3) Restricted availability of reference data: Availability of reference data for private company based services is better compared to the time before INSPIRE but is still a challenge.
Forest Flux project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 821860.