7th FP ENVISION Project

UNOOSA was invited and attended the EU-funded 7th FP ENVISION Project (http://www.envision-project.eu/) meeting in Bucharest, Romania, in the March 13-14, 2012 period.

A number of interesting applications in the context of a flood monitoring in trans-boundary context pilot case applied to the Danube river were presented and discussed, and the UN-SPIDER Knowledge Portal was also introduced to the workshop participants as a potential information dissemination tool for such use cases.

ENVISION’s main objective is to provide a collaborative platform for sharing environmental models and services. Its corresponding pilot cases are used to test the benefits of the technologies developed in the project, but also to prove the usefulness of the platform in real situations and adjust it according to potential users’ necessities.

ENVISION community collaboration is defined through several workshops aimed at presenting the capabilities of the ENVISION platform to be used by non-ICT skilled users as decision support system for various environmental hazards management. During the last year of the project, ENVISION is organizing three end-user workshops (March, June, and October 2012), with the following goals: receive feedback on the ENVISION technologies from the community; validate ENVISION technologies in concrete pilot cases; Follow-up activities with potential end-users.

The first workshop was held in Bucharest, Romania during March 13-14, 2012. The workshop focused on the “Real-time monitoring of Floods in a Trans-boundary Context“ domain and had the following goals:

• Introduce the pilot case on real-time monitoring of floods evolutions in a trans-boundary context (Danube river)
• Present the ENVISION platform and technologies and their use in pilot cases
• Collect feedback, comments, and remarks from experts and potential end-users
• Identify possibilities for future collaborations

The workshop was attended by a total of 50 participants (the list of participants is available here). The workshop was organized around presentations from the ENVISION consortium and participating organizations, demos and discussions. The agenda and presentations are provided as follows.

Tuesday, March 13th

14:00 – 14:10 Welcome and Introduction to the Workshop by Dumitru Roman (SINTEF) and Mircea Grosu (CS)
14:10 – 14:55 ENVISION Overview by Dumitru Roman (SINTEF)
14:55 – 15:20 ENVISION for Landslide Hazard and Risk Assessment by Francois Tertre (BRGM)
15:20 – 16:30 ENVISION for Real-time Monitoring of Floods in Trans-boundary Context by Mihaela Ionescu, Marius Vilcu, and Cosmin Udroiu (CS Romania)
16:30 – 16:45 Coffee Break
16:45 – 18:00 Demos and Discussions
19:30 Official Dinner

Wednesday, March 14th

09:00 – 10:30 Presentations from Participants (15 min / presentation)
- Creating risk maps along the Danube river in a harmonized methodology – The Danube Project Floodrisk by Mary-Jeanne ADLER (National Institute of Hydrology and Water Management – Romania and ICPDR – Austia)
- On-going works and projects at the Hungarian Hydrological Forecasting Service (VITUKI) by András CSĺK (Vituki Environmental Protection and Water Management Research Institute, Hungary)
- SHMI and its position in flood protection in Slovakia by Michal HAZLINGER (Slovak Hydrometeorological Institute, Slovakia)
- The European Flood Awareness System for the Danube– from research to operations by Jutta THIELEN-DEL POZO (Institute for Environment and Sustainability – Joint Research Centre, Italy)
- Satellite based service  for flood monitoring in Romania by Gheorghe STANCALIE (Vasile CRACIUNESCU) (National Meteorological Administration, Romania)
- Presentation of the ISECAD solution by Suzanne BALTAY (Astrium, France)
10:30 – 10:45 Coffee Break
10:45 – 11:45 Discussions: Applicability of ENVISION technologies for Participating Organizations
11:45 – 12:15 Discussions: Follow-up Activities for Collaboration between ENVISION and Participating Organizations
12:30 Summary and Lunch

Following the conclusions of the workshop, the ENVISION consortium will set-up an instance of the ENVISION platform which will be populated with data and services identified relevant during the workshop. A first version of this installation is expected around summer 2012, to which the participating organizations at the workshop will be given access and invited to test the platform with relevant data and services from their domain, in preparation for the workshop expected to take place in October 2012.

The ENVISION project received positive feedback after the workshop, with 20 workshop questionnaires received on spot immediately after the workshop. A summary of the feedback received through the questionnaires is available here.