Online the website of the project “ERMES: an Earth obseRvation Model based RicE information Service”

ERMES

The website of ERMES, the project coordinated by the Institute for Electromagnetic Sensing of the Environment and funded under the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Union, is from today active at http://www.ermes-fp7space.eu.

The agricultural sector needs a sustainable approach both economically and environmentally. ERMES intends to give its instrumental and research contribution in this direction. In particular, the project - lasting three years (2014-2017) - aims to build a prototype of services dedicated to the agri-cultural sector of rice-growing productions.

ERMES will integrate different areas of research: from the innovative techniques of remote sensing and Earth Observation (EO), which use data from satellite sensors (optical and radar), to modeling solutions of crop growth, in order to produce geo-referenced data dedicated to the sector of rice production. The produced information will be supplied to end users through advanced Web services (Geoportal) and smart applications. In this context, the project aims to provide innovative solutions useful to various stakeholders: authorities, agro-environmental policymakers, farms that must meet the criteria of sustainability of production in terms of economic and environmental impact and, not least, the agro-business sector, interested in the monitoring of production and the state of the crops.

"The ERMES website has been thought so that whoever, in addition to the researchers involved and the experts, can follow the progress of the research and the obtained results, and can also retrieve data, documents, maps, models and applications produced" explains Mirco Boschetti (IREA), Project Coordinator of ERMES. "The platform, set up in a multilingual version and with the possibility of sharing on the most important social networks, will be the main tool for the project communication and dissemination".