European Topic Centres (ETCs) are consortia of organisations in member countries of the European Environment Agency (EEA) with expertise in specific environmental areas which are supporting the EEA in the implementation of the EEA work programmes. The ETCs, working together with the countries from the European Environment Information and Observation Network (Eionet), facilitate the provision of data and information from the countries and deliver reports and other services to the EEA and Eionet.
space4environment is a long-time member of the ETC on Urban, Land and Soil systems (ETC/ULS) which recently transformed into the ETC on Data Integration and Digitalisation (ETC/DI) and was part of the former ETC on Biological Diversity (ETC/BD).
The multi-annual objective of the ETC/DI is to contribute to the activities of the EEA by supporting the digitalisation process of EEA including the harmonisation and enhancement of data reporting and management flows and increasing relevant capacities across Eionet from 2022 to 2026. The ETC/DI mainly supports the EEA/Eionet Strategic Objective 4: Making full use of the potential of data, technology and digitalisation and is collaborating with EEA colleagues and the related ETCs from the Biodiversity and ecosystems, Climate change mitigation and adaptation, Human health and environment, as well as Sustainability trends, prospects and responses sectors.
The main tasks of the ETC/BD was to assist the EEA in its task of reporting on Europe's environment by addressing state and trends of biodiversity in Europe, to provide the relevant information to support the implementation of environmental and sustainable development policies in Europe in particular for EU nature and biodiversity policies (DG Environment: Nature and Biodiversity), as well as to build capacity for reporting on biodiversity in Europe, mainly through Eionet.
Through the ETCs we are involved in a very diverse range of projects covering both thematic as well as technical subjects. Our work includes the whole value chain from data acquisition, handling and analysis through different technical solutions like data cubes, over managing data flows up to processing the data for thematic assessments and indicators. Using a broad field of specialized tools such as automated scripting in big data pools, data manipulation and classification or business intelligence our aim is always to obtain as much information from the data as possible presenting these by user-friendly visualizations. We implemented such projects for themes like land accounting and resource use efficiency, green infrastructure, ecosystems and their services, or urban sustainability and adaptation. Many of the projects resulted in ETC/ULS or EEA reports which we partly coordinated and partly contributed to.