Rapid Action on COVID19 with Earth Observation (RACE) dashboard challenge

#COVID19

Gepubliceerd op 19 april 2021

ESA EOP in collaboration with EC DG-DEFIS launched the "Rapid Action on COVID19 with Earth Observation (RACE)" initiative, investigating how Earth Observation (EO) can contribute to monitoring and understanding the impacts of the pandemic on the economy and environment.

The RACE dashboard showcases various indicators quantifying the pandemic's impact on economy, agriculture or air and water quality. The dashboard also features two community contributed indicators, driving trucks and flying airplanes, both of which resulted from a scripting contest held back in 2020. Recently a new series of RACE monthly challenges was launched. Each month, the challenges are calling for innovative approaches to respond to interdisciplinary challenge scenarios.

The latest challenge launched investigates the following question: "How can EO contribute to monitoring and understanding the impacts of the pandemic on the economy and the environment?"

The primary coding and analysis environment is the EuroDataCube platform, for which interested participants are provided access. Various Jupyter tutorial notebooks have been prepared demonstrating how to access different datasets and how to use them in analytic approaches.

Innovative ideas are given the opportunity to onboard new indicators into the RACE dashboard. For this, each challenge follows a 3-stage roadmap, during which participants can receive up to 11,000 EUR in prize money:

  • Stage 1: participants propose an idea and develop a small prototype - each selected idea receives 1,000 EUR, a EuroDataCube enterprise license and the chance to go to Stage 2;
  • Stage 2: participants upscale their idea within the EuroDataCube environment - the first three winners receive 5,000/2,500/1,000 EUR and a chance to go to Stage 3;
  • Stage 3: participants integrate their indicators into the RACE Dashboard and each indicator receives 5,000 EUR.