EO2HEAVEN (Earth Observation and Environmental Modelling for the Mitigation of Health Risks)

Project title

Earth observation and environmental modelling for the mitigation of health risks

Funding

EU FP7 Projekt 190301/52

Motivation

Urban and industrial development results in a number of global and local changes, prominent examples are:

Human-induced landscape changes: urban land-use planning produce woodland clearance, soil erosion, mineral and trace element deficiencies, natural disaster risk exposure (floods and wildfires), etc…
Changes due day-to-day activities of human populations: these activities produce air pollution emissions and toxic waste. Human populations are exposed to these emissions directly. In addition they might be indirectly affected through the food chain or other complex environmental processes.
Climate change: it is an obvious cause of landscape changes resulting from the long-term imprint of human activities.

All these changes in environmental conditions have a great impact on human health. The environmental factors to consider in relation with health issues are airborne, marine, and water pollution, stratospheric ozone depletion, persistent organic pollutants, changes in the spatial and timely distribution of pollen and other antigens triggering asthma, and weather-related disease vectors due to climatic changes. It is difficult to quantify the burden of health problems that can be attributed to the change of the above mentioned environmental conditions, but it includes cardio-respiratory diseases, infectious diseases and reduced life expectancy. Much environmental and health data exist, however, causality must be established between environmental factors and human health and the corresponding appropriateness of the treatment of adverse health conditions.

Aim of the Project

EO2HEAVEN shall contribute to a better understanding of the complex relationships between environmental changes and their impact on human health. The project will monitor changes induced by human activities, with emphasis on atmospheric, river, lake and coastal marine pollution. The result will be the design and development of a GIS based upon an open and standards-based Spatial Information Infrastructure (SII) envisaged as a helpful tool for research of human exposure and early detection of infections. The key factors of the EO2HEAVEN system will be

an enhanced integration of remotly sensed and in-situ environmental measurements and
the development of models to relate these environmental data to exposure and health data.

During the project the requirements from three different Case Studies (in Europe and South Africa) will be assessed and the technical solutions will be evaluated through an iterative process, thus ensuring that the solutions can be applied to a global scale.

Project Organisation

The figure illustrates the interactions among the EO2HEAVEN Work Packages (WPs) within the three development cycles: WP2 provides the detailed specifications of the use cases. In each development cycle WP2 sends its specifications to WP3 and WP4. WP3 focuses on the development of tools for integrating in-situ data, earth observation data, and simulation data and on analysing relations between environment and health to design appropriate models. WP4 is specifying generic architecture components to be implemented by WP5. WP5 sends its implementations back to WP2 that will then do the validation work.

Case study for Europe

Environmental effects on allergies and cardiovascular diseases in Saxony, Germany

This Case Study will focus especially on allergies, allergic asthma and cardiovascular diseases in relation to the environmental parameters ozone (ground level and atmospheric), particulate matter (PM 0.1, PM 2.5 and PM10), sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide, pollen and a number of meteorological conditions. The purpose of this Case study is to develop an alerting system so that preventive measures can be taken to avoid adverse health effects resulting from environmental air pollution.

First iteration: main aspects will be data collection and data preparation. Then the data fusion and first data analysis for whole Saxony will follow. Specifically the focus lies on the correlation of health and environmental data, which means also the linkage between remote and in-situ data. Another methodology aspect is the development and validation of methods for extraction of environmental parameters from remote sensing data and in-situ measurement data.
Second iteration: all the analysis and the first results of a correlation between environment and health will move into the development of the Spatial Information Infrastructure. Furthermore, an additional focus on the city Dresden should be made. The linkage between environment and health should be investigated in more detail there, especially in a higher spatial resolution. In the Information System interactive and web-based air quality maps will be designed, also allergy and cardiovascular disease risk maps and exposure maps.

Third iteration: a health risk information and alerting system should be developed. For experts a prototype of a health risk information system will be designed. The alerting system, which should inform about the current environmental exposition risk, should also be available for citizens. In this last iteration also an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) will be integrated to allow the integration of ad-hoc data acquisition and spatial and temporal high-resolution data.

Project partnerS

Fraunhofer Institute for Information and Data Processing IOSB (Germany)
Technische Universität Dresden (Germany)
52°North Intitiative for Geospatial Open Source Software GmbH (Germany)
Atos Origin Sociedad Anonima Espanola (Spain)
Spot Image (France)
Nev@ntropic (France)
European Commission DG JRC (Belgium)
Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Meraka Institute (South Africa)
Open Geospatial Consortium (Europe) Limited (United Kingdom)
Bureau de Recherches Geologiques et Minieres (France)
International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (The Netherlands)
University KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa)

Contact

Prof. Dr. habil. Hans-Gerd Maas (Leitung)
Dipl.-Ing. Nadine Stelling, Dipl.-Ing. Katharina Pech, Dipl.-Geogr. Anette Richter (Bearbeitung)