This task will perform a broad user needs analysis to determine both the platform-oriented and user-oriented requirements for Green-HIT. Questionnaires will be prepared targeting all forest management and monitoring related groups, including governmental organizations, forest dependent communities, the scientific community as well as forest related industries. The questionnaires will be prepared and distributed over the first months of the project. The responses will then be collected and analysed to provide a thorough report on the needs and requirements that will enable the design and guideline the objectives of the Green-HIT platform.

Based on the user needs analysis, this Task will focus on identifying the most important categories of forests, forest areas with respect their composition, landscape as well as the biodiversity within and on their surroundings in order to select the pilot sites that will demonstrate the applicability and usability of the Green-HIT platform in heterogeneous environments. The pilot studies will be defined in cooperation with experts from the Department of Forests (letter of intent can be found at the end of this proposal), which will also provide access to the selected sites, as well as consortium partners with expertise in forest related aspects. The target of the pilot studies will be both to enable the evaluation of the platform usability through the highest possible number of users and also to showcase the added value provided by the platform managing and monitoring forest areas. A preliminary categorization provided by the Green-HIT project’s forest experts is as follows: (i) coniferous pine forests (i.e., forest stands of Pinus brutia and Pinus nigra, Juniperus spp. and the endemic forest stands of Cedrus brevifolia) (ii) forest stands of evergreen endemic Quercus anlifolia, (iii) broad-leaved forest stands (i.e. Quercus infectoria and Arbutus andrachne) and (iv) riparian forests of Plantanus orientalis and Alnus orientalis From those categories, consortium experts will investigate and propose forests for each category. A preliminary proposition to be included in the pilot studies distributed almost all over the whole Cyprus and covering all categories is the following: ▪ Pafos Forest– dense forest stands of: Pinus brutia, Cedrus brevifolia Quercus alnifolia, Quercus infectoria, Arbutus andrachne and riparian forests. (PAFOS) ▪ Troodos Forest– dense forest stands of: Pinus nigra, Juniperus spp. and Quercus anlifolia (NICOSIA) ▪ Akamas Forest – dense forest stands of Maki vegetation. (AKAMAS)

This task will determine and define the content that will be stored in the big data ready database for each site category following the categorization of Task 3.2, as well as for each of the individual intelligence modules necessary for the prevention, detection and reaction on the various events. Initially, the Green-HIT database will be filled and enriched with existing data that will be provided by the consortium partners (e.g., COPERNICUS, EFFIS.) Data will span from textual content (e.g., csv), audio (e.g., mp3), images (e.g., jpeg, GeoTIFF), videos (e.g., mp4), 3D data (e.g., .fbx and .obj), 360° panoramic photos/videos and localization data. For example, in the case of the fire prevention, detection and reaction module data such as environmental factors related to weather, fuel and topology (e.g., temperature, humidity, CO2) as well as factors derived from satellite data (e.g., free and open satellite data from Europe (i.e., Sentinel missions) and USA (i.e., Landsat missions) which can be used for the creation of vegetation condition maps, indicating the stress of the vegetation) will need to be defined, modelled and collected, in the case of illegal logging and/or hunting audio data from acoustic sensors will be also collected. Additionally, for habitat mapping and inventory localization data (e.g., GPS, LoRWAN RSSI) in addition to various Flora and Fauna Data, Biodiversity data; Natura 2000 monitoring data and data related to the IUCN Red Book will be needed for instant alert in case an incident is detected and the authorities should be notified to take action.

This task will initially oversee the user interface design and user experience principles following the output of Task T3.1 of this WP, in cooperation with the technical partners. The user interface design will consider all state-of-the-art design principles, thus providing an enhanced user experience for all parts of the CMS, Web dashboard and Smartphone applications that will be developed in WP5. Special considerations will be taken for the design to conform to accessibility standards, i.e. W3C Web CODEVELOP-GT/0322 – PART B – TECHNICAL ANNEX 14 Accessibility Initiative etc. Additionally this task will analyze the user-needs of Task 3.1 to specify the needed functional requirements and technologies for the (i) Big-data ready database (e.g., spark/hadoop stack, Couchbase, Map-Reduce), (ii) Content Management System (e.g., MVC), (iii) Web-based dashboard (e.g., how to display the content, the statistics, the notifications and the recommendations), (iv) Smartphone Application (e.g., necessary features and technologies for mapping and inventory forest data on the field), (v) the necessary APIs for all modules and sub-systems (CMS, WEB, Smartphone App, Fire module, Illegal logging module, afforestation and reforestation recommendation module and all other detection modules.)