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Collaboration with the BEYOND Center of Excellence

Point of contact
Dimitra Tsoutsou
PRAXI Network / Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas
8 Kolokotroni Str.
10561 Athens
Phone: +30-210-3607690


A 2-day event will take place and will present best practice showcases for the exploitation of Copernicus data for Disaster Risk Reduction applications from studies and achievements of the BEYOND Center of Excellence (http://beyond-eocenter.eu/). Climate change intensifies natural disasters in Greece (e.g. Forest fires, flash floods, landslides etc.), resulting in devastating events and human losses. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to both inform the relevant authorities/parties about the use of EO data and also to train targeted user groups of using EO derived information.

BEYOND Centre of Excellence (http://beyond-eocenter.eu/) was established in the framework of the FP7-REGPOT-2012-2013-1 and maintains a fully operational and self-sustained activity through competitive funding from Space research and operational projects supported by EU, ESA and International Funding Organisations (FP7, H2020, ESA EOEP, WB, EIB, etc.). The Centre is hosted at the National Observatory of Athens (NOA) - Institute of Astronomy, Astrophysics, Space Applications and Remote Sensing (IAASARS) and officially started in June 2013. The Centre now successfully operates, conducting a lot of activations and studies on monitoring of Natural Disasters. In the last years, there were two tragic cases in Greece, flash flood events in Mandra (2017) with 24 human losses and forest fires in Athens-Mati (2018) with 97 human losses. More recently, in summer 2021 there were also multiple wildfires burning in Greece (Attica, Evia, Peloponnese) that caused severe environmental damage. The BEYOND Centre of Excellence has been mandated to serve national authorities towards Disaster Risk Reduction.

This overwhelming number of recent losses and the climate projections that are showing the intensification of natural disaster phenomena, generates the need to organize at national scale an information and training event, informing relevant stakeholders (e.g. Decision Makers, Policy Makers, Civil Protection etc.) about the EO derived information and other users (e.g. companies, developers, research institutes) about how to access, handle and process Copernicus EO data and services.

Stakeholders of the mentioned areas will be invited, among them public bodies with a mandate to act upon a crisis (civil protection agencies at local and national scale, e.g. fire brigade, Members of Region of Attica will be invited etc.), private companies (e.g. EO added-value providers), and research bodies.

The event will focus on demonstrating the information that Copernicus EO data and services can provide tangible and important information to relevant stakeholders, supporting the decision making and minimizing both the extent of the disaster and human losses.

The trainings will focus on demonstrating the EO data transformation along the entire value chain, from raw Sentinel data and other Copernicus services to final products & services that provide actionable knowledge, transparency, and increase in efficiency and, in some cases, commercial value.

This event will be also a tool to map the interest of the different stakeholders. A feedback form will be distributed in the end of the event in order to help NOA and PRAXI provide more targeted services to the participants.

Outputs and Results

  • 1 event will last for 2 days. During the 1st day the focus will be to inform relevant stakeholders and the second to train specific user groups based on BEYOND’s knowledge and expertise
  • A training manual brochure will be produced for the needs of the info and training event