Geotec will participate in the project ERMES (An Earth obseRvation Model based ricE smart information Service) within the European-funded FP7.  The EU FP7 project ERMES aims to apply and refine the aforementioned crop modelling techniques for rice cultivation in a European context, and combine them with modern, state-of-the-art technical solutions.

The European FP7 project ERMES focuses specifically on rice cultivation, and aims to combine earth observation, crop modelling and ICT techniques and tools to optimize agro-practices and ultimately, support environmentally and economically sustainable farming systems. ERMES combines partners from Europe’s three main rice-producing countries: Italy (51,3%), Spain (25,4%) and Greece (7%).

In ERMES, recently available technologies, such as Sentinel-1 satellite images, technical expertise in crop modelling and image analysis, remote sensing and modern ICT technologies (e.g., geo-spatial and mobile technologies), will be combined to realize improvements to current crop modelling research, and create a state-of-the-art solutions to assist farmers and local regulatory authorities in the rice cultivation process.

The project has started today and it has a three year duration. Others partners are:

• CNR (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Italy)
• SARMAP (SARMAP sa, Switzerland)
• UVEG (Universitat de Valencia, Spain)
• AUTH (Aristotelio Panepistimio Thessalonikis, Greece)
• DEMETER (Hellenic Agricultural Organization)