GroundTruth
European Union Projects
Project duration: 
Sep 2016 to Aug 2019

Ground Truth 2.0 delivers the demonstration and validation of six scaled up citizen observatories in real operational conditions both in the EU and in Africa. It will strengthen the full feedback-loop in the information chain from citizenbased data collection to knowledge sharing for joint decision-making and cooperative planning.

Introduction

The project focuses on environmental indicators in urban and rural areas related to spatial planning issues, with a specific focus on flora and fauna as well as water availability and water quality for land and natural resources management. This is supported by an innovative web-based service for worldwide mapping and updating of land use.

The overall objectives of Ground Truth 2.0 are to implement sustainable citizen observatories for the demonstration of their societal and economic benefits, and the global market uptake of the Ground Truth 2.0 concept and enabling technologies. The trans-disciplinary Ground Truth 2.0 approach consists of a multi-actor innovation process to combine the social dimensions of citizen observatories with enabling technologies so that their customisation and deployment is tailored to the envisaged societal and economic impacts of the observatories. The demonstration cases (4 EU and 2 African) cover the full 'spectrum’ of citizen-sensed data usage and citizen engagement, and therefore allow testing and validating of the concept and technologies, and evaluation of their impacts under a range of conditions.

The Ground Truth 2.0 consortium presents a good mix of industry, SME, NGO, government, research and academia to ensure the roll out and uptake of the observatories. Ground Truth 2.0 is coordinating and interacting with other relevant initiatives, such as GEOSS, INSPIRE as well as the sister projects funded under the same call (namely GROW, SCENT and LANDSENSE) to create mutual synergies.