The areas of R&I are:

1. the development of new and innovative methods to integrate the current land products into land surface, land use and cover change, and more sophisticated land planning and allocation models for different environment, including through cross services approaches and using all relevant Copernicus service products, and thus extending the potential limited uptake of land product into land planning decisions, offering new dimensions and new interests for Copernicus land products. In addition, the project should demonstrate the added value of Copernicus land service products when they are integrated and/or assimilated into the models.
2. the development of an integrated, harmonized and coherent product provision system making use of new and innovative methods and observations (e.g.; SWOT mission) to improve the portfolio of the current inland and coastal/shore hydrological satellite observation products with more sophisticated and/or new products, in order to improve global scale hydrological monitoring and forecasting. The development should consider cross services approaches and all relevant Copernicus service products. It should extend the uptake (incl. assimilation) of inland water satellite observation product into hydrological models, consider a consistent approach to hydrological modelling for different purposes (e.g. continental water monitoring under climate change, improved flood and drought forecasting, support to water applications in sectors such as agriculture and energy, forcing coastal models) and offering new dimensions and new interests for Copernicus land, inland and coastal water products. In addition, the project should demonstrate the added value of Copernicus water satellite observation products when they are integrated and/or assimilated into models based on scientific quality validation approaches.

A proposal should address only one area, which must be clearly identified.

The projects should take into account the existing services and clearly define to what extent the services will be improved with new elements or products, including the use of enhanced models, algorithms, tools and techniques to generate new product(s). The projects should build, where possible and relevant, on open-source models, tools and datasets already used or produced by the existing Copernicus services.