Dissemination and Capacity-building Using Copernicus Data and the Algorithms and Value-added Products from the French Land Data Center Theia

The scientific community and the public stakeholders are the main targeted audience of the action, but the private sector can also benefit from synergies and pooling effects and should be included as largely as possible. The training component will contribute to reinforce all these users’ capacity in satellite data use for environmental purposes. In practice, the offer of training in remote sensing will be developed in cooperation with all the institutes and universities parts of the French national data center Theia network.

As part of the proposed training, we will promote Copernicus data and products such as urban and landuse/landcover maps. The use of Sentinel remote sensing data (in particular Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2) and the training of new users in remote sensing will be important points of what we propose. As there are a lot of products in Theia that are complementary to Copernicus products (with better spatial or temporal resolutions as well as products not available in Copernicus), training and transfer will also concern these products.

A workshop and a spring school will be organized each year (3 in total). The aim of workshops is to present some research works that use Copernicus data and products. As for the spring schools, they aim to train academics, students, public and private actors to data and services of Copernicus. In detail, the spring schools have the following goals:

• Promote Sentinel remote sensing data (in particular Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2) and training of new users in remote sensing: download data, preprocessing ...
• Promote Copernicus products and services such as urban and landuse/landcover maps
• Learn to use the remote sensing image processing library OTB (OrfeoToolBox: (Open Source software package for the processing of remote sensing images) and to apply it to environmental applications; the use of OTB application facilitates the use of remote sensing data (Feature extraction, Calibration, Classification, Segmentation, etc.)
• Share lessons learned on added value products, developed and produced in the frame of the Theia French land data center (Theia is a French national inter-agency organization designed to foster the use of products derived from the space observation of land surfaces); Theia products and algorithms are complementary to Copernicus products

In practice, the spring school will be organized with parallel tutorial sessions (up to 6). Each tutorial session focuses on a given theme and can accommodate between 10 and 15 people. The purpose of tutorial sessions is to make users operational on the use of Copernicus and Theia data and products. For this reason, the tutorials will be done with mainly a practical part. We aim at the end of each workshop/spring school session a good knowledge of Copernicus data and products.

We are targeting 60 to 80 people at each spring school. We aim among the participants 50% of academics (professors and students), 25% of public actors (managers or engineers from ministries) and 25% of private actors. Furthermore, the workshops and spring schools organized in a given country will be open to neighbouring countries. Our goal is to welcome at least ten people from neighbouring countries.

Two countries have already been chosen for the organization of our training: Lebanon and Morocco. For the third year we are targeting Brazil or Uzbekistan (still to be planned).