EO4HumEn

       

Project Title	EO4HumEn+: Extended EO-based services for dynamic information needs in humanitarian action
Project partners	- Paris-Lodron University of Salzburg, Interfaculty Department of Geoinformatics – Z_GIS, Salzburg, Austria [Project leader] - Austrian Red Cross - Earth Observation Center (EOC) of the German Aerospace Center DLR [with own funding] - Spatial Services GmbH, Salzburg, Austria - University Tübingen, Department of Geography, Germany [Subcontractor]  - Groundwater Relief [Subcontractor] - International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) [associated] - SOS Children's Villages [associated] - Doctors without Borders Section Austria [associated]
Funding	Austrian Research Promotion Agency (German: Österreichische Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft or FFG) under the Austrian Space Applications Programme (ASAP 12, Nr. 854041)
Duration	May 2016 – April 2018
Budget	430,000 €

 

Project objectives

The number of forcibly uprooted people rises every year. Humanitarian action as one part of the response to this situation relies on targeted, up-to date and reliable information to handle this challenge. Within precursor activities and a close collaboration with Doctors without Borders (MSF), Z_GIS has started developing Earth-observation (EO) based solutions for the humanitarian sector. Thereby we address the following challenges:

(1) large numbers of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) worldwide live not only in camps, but more than half of the world’s refugee population under UNHCR mandate lives in urban settings,

(2) monitoring of environmental resources like groundwater or wood reserves is a concern of humanitarian actors, but the current EO-based solutions are seldom automated and therefore do not tap the full potential of the immense amounts of satellite data, and

(3) there is an increasing demand for a diversified product portfolio within a growing user community.

The aim of the project EO4HumEn+ is to implement more automated routines to exploit the data stream of e.g. the Sentinel mission, improving the capabilities of EO methods to provide realistic population estimations also in urban areas as well as extend the established service portfolio to the diversifying needs of the humanitarian community, cooperating with a wide range of NGOs including ICRC, the Austrian Red Cross, SOS Children’s Villages, MSF and Groundwater Relief.