News & Events
- March 21, 2023
eBOS Participates in the CiROCCO Kick-off Meeting
On March 21st, the project CiROCCO ‘Enhancing the In-situ Environmental Observations across Under-sampled Deserts’ held its face-to-face kick-off meeting. This 36-month EU-funded Innovation Action funded under the Horizon Europe programme officially started on the 1st of March 2023.
Our colleagues Dr. Marios Sophocleous, R&D Project Manager and Mr. Christos Skoufis, Senior R&D Project Manager (Online), participated in the face-to-face kick-off-meeting, which was chaired by Chrysoula Papathanasiou, Project Manager / Senior Researcher at the Institute of Communications & Computer Systems (ICCS), as the Coordinator of CiROCCO. The 12 consortium partners attended the meeting, which included partners’ introductions, a presentation of the vision, objectives and plan of the project by the project coordinator, and an overview of the overall project expectations and guidelines by the European Commission.
Desert ecosystems are predicted to be one of the most vulnerable ecosystems to global climate change; rising temperature, decreasing rainfall, and increasing carbon emissions, are expected to strongly affect the structure and function of desert ecosystems. Desert-adapted species are vulnerable to climate change and amongst them, endemic plant species are particularly susceptible to the loss of suitable habitat. The negative effect of climate change on desert plants has been demonstrated worldwide. However, desert ecosystems and local meteorological conditions can differ so much that over the last 15 years, some deserts have taken on a greener appearance. Increasing temperatures cause more evaporation over the sea, which causes condensation to fall onto dry land.
CiROCCO’s vision is to establish an end-to-end sensing system, composed of a distributed network of cost-effective sensing nodes coupled with state-of-the-art data fusion remote sensing and assimilation modelling techniques. The defined network of sensors will enhance the current lack of ground observation in desert areas offering an operational, easy-to-maintain, expandable solution. Commercialisation activities will ensure the sustainability of CiROCCO’s solution. The findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability (FAIR) management of the data will support cross-COPERNICUS ecosystem integration and assimilation services.
eBOS acts as the project’s Quality Assurance manager, contributes to the elaboration of CiROCCO’s dissemination and sustainability plans, and plans to maximise the project’s impact by widely disseminating the project’s results to key membership associations. eBOS technical role in the project is: (i) the translation of the functional and non-functional pilot requirements into technical specifications, for the development of the technological components of CiROCCO; (ii) leading the pilots and specifically the scene set-up, benchmarking definition, operational management and DevOps task; (iii) responsible for developing and prototyping the low-cost, in-situ electronic sensing nodes that will be used in the high-density sensor network, aiming to enhance the in-situ measurement resolution in hard-to-reach areas.
