ESADEMICS

It has become abundantly clear during the COVID-19 pandemic that environmental factors can be important in the emergence, spread, health impact, social political response, and socioeconomic recovery plan from Sars-Cov-2/COVID-19. Having tools available to study the impact of the environment for this pandemic and future pandemics is important to increase preparedness and curtail future societal and economic costs. However, despite the fact that many useful data sources are existing, it remains a tremendous challenge for scientists to combine all these data for their research.

The various satellite missions of the European Space Agency (ESA) have led to a plethora of data assets. These assets are publicly available and are used in many scientific projects. The relation between well-being and changes in our habitat require data about our living environment. These data can be reliably and effectively collected using earth observation instruments such as satellites. These satellite data are available from data stores that have been developed by ESA or their operational organisations. For many of the data stores a historical archive is available as well.

Even though the data from the various missions are reliable and timely stored in these data stores, their usability for research on the relation between our well-being and our living environment is somehow limited. This is caused by a number of factors. First of all data is not easily accessible to epidemiologists, since they lack specific knowledge on data stores, file formatting standards, etc. In addition, epidemiological research often requires derived data rather than the data stored. And finally, the data stores from ESA and other providers have not been designed with the idea that data can be combined; linking atmospheric data to land cover maps is not a simple query.

ESADEMICS aims at making a number  of air quality, water quality and mismanaged waste data sources available that are relevant for epidemiological use cases. The focus of this project is to combine a set of relevant data sources from (amongst others) ESA and develop methods to link these different data sources related to air quality, water quality, and mismanaged waste on geolocation and time period. These methods hide the complexity from the epidemiologists to deal with different spatial and time scales of the different data sources. The resulting data set can be retrieved and combined with other data sources (population health data) in their statistical environment.