EuroGEOSS: An interdisciplinary approach to research and applications for forestry, biodiversity and drought

GEOSS envisions a future wherein decisions and actions for the benefit of humankind are informed by coordinated, comprehensive and sustained Earth observations and information. Ultimately, this requires the ability to integrate information across scientific domains to address issues at regional and global levels. EuroGEOSS, an EC-sponsored FP7 project, has built an initial operating capability (IOC) in the three strategic areas of drought, forestry and biodiversity to facilitate and demonstrate multi-disciplinary applications. EuroGEOSS has implemented a brokering service that allows finding and accessing data from a wide range of standards and domainspecific practices including the use of a semantically rich querying capability. The paper presents the functionalities achieved by EuroGEOSS. The paper also presents the impact of advanced services through an assessment of societal benefits of the extended information availability.