ENVIROGRIDS · Building Capacity for a Black Sea Catchment Observation and Assessment System supporting Sustainable Development

The Black Sea Catchment is internationally known as one of ecologically unsustainable development and inadequate resource management, which has led to severe environmental, social and economic problems. EnviroGRIDS @ Black Sea Catchment aims at building the capacities of regional stakeholders to use new international standards to gather, store, distribute, analyze, visualize and disseminate crucial information on past, present and future states of the environment, in order to assess its sustainability and vulnerability. The EnviroGRIDS @ Black Sea Catchment project addresses these issues by bringing several emerging information technologies that are revolutionizing the way we are able to observe our planet. The Group on Earth Observation Systems of Systems (GEOSS) is building a data-driven view of our planet that feeds into models and scenarios. EnviroGRIDS aims at building the capacity of scientist to assemble such a system in the Black Sea Catchment, the capacity of decision-makers to use it, and the capacity of the general public to understand the important environmental, social and economic issues at stake. To achieve its objectives, EnviroGRIDS will build an ultra-modern Grid enabled Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI) that will become one component in the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), compatible with the new EU directive on Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Union (INSPIRE). EnviroGRIDS will particularly target the needs of the Black Sea Commission (BSC) and the International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River (ICPDR) in order to help bridging the gap between science and policy.