The PEOPLE-ECCO project held its first Living Lab

The ecosystem conversation has become more challenging at a time when the impacts of human activities, such as climate change, have increased dramatically. As part of the Earth Observation Science for Society (EO4Society) program, the European Space Agency (ESA) has launched a series of programs to fund projects that strive to support the conservation of ecosystems and strengthen biodiversity: Pioneering Earth Observation Applications for the Environment (PEOPLE).

52°North – together with ITC, Hatfield and DHI – has been granted funding to implement a solution under these activities. PEOPLE-ECCO (Enhancing Ecosystems Conservation through Earth Observation Solutions, Capacity Development and Co-design) addresses critical needs expressed by Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) seeking to improve evidence-based ecosystem conservation. The PEOPLE-ECCO project follows two high-level objectives:

1. Engage CSOs/NGOs active in ecosystem conservation by involving them in the co-design of EO methodologies applicable in their operational practices and through EO capacity building activities;
2. Develop, test, demonstrate and validate EO-integrated methods, based on the identified user requirements and co-design.

Six NGOs/CSOs, referred to as “Early Adopters,” play a pivotal role in the project by contributing to the creation of actionable, relevant EO-based tools and methods. These Early Adopters include African Parks, the Bulgarian Society for the Protection of Birds, the Lebanon Reforestation Initiative, IUCN Vietnam, the Prince Edward Island Watershed Alliance, and Reef Check Malaysia. Collectively, they represent efforts across four continents and manage a diverse array of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.

52°North’s role is to design and develop the platform that manages all technical aspects of the EO algorithm execution. The platform will provide an intuitive interface for the Early Adopters to configure and execute the algorithms for their specific areas of interest, as well as view and download previous analysis results. Under the hood, the architecture leverages the openEO platform to do the heavy lifting of EO data processing. The openEO process graph serves as the interoperability interface between the PEOPLE-ECCO system and openEO platform. 52°North will implement an OGC API Processes interface to allow API-based execution of analysis. All software developed in the project will be made available as Open Source and contribute to the EO and ecosystems community.

The project started with an online kick-off meeting in October and will continue until September 2026. During the recent BioSpace25 conference, the PEOPLE-ECCO team organized the first physical co-design workshop. This “Living Lab” brought together representatives of the Early Adopters, ESA and the project partners to discuss the requirements and objectives of the project’s EO solution. A public session and a project-specific workshop generated a lot of insightful information that will help shape the technical architecture and overall solution.

PEOPLE-ECCO is funded by the European Space Agency as one of the projects in the Pioneering Earth Observation Applications for the Environment (PEOPLE) series of the Earth Observation Science for Society (EO4Society) program.