Terravision and MasterMine are two Horizon Europe projects that are helping transform the mining sector through digital innovation and Earth Observation. Both projects focus on enhancing the sustainability, resilience, and automation of mining operations, with a strong emphasis on using geospatial intelligence and monitoring services.
As a technical partner in both initiatives, Terradue delivers cloud-based Earth Observation (EO) services on the Geohazards Exploitation Platform (GEP). These services support the monitoring of terrain motion, critical infrastructure assessment, and the generation of actionable insights for sustainable raw materials management.
Terravision: EO Services for Sustainable Raw Materials
The Terravision project focuses on the critical raw materials value chain, aiming to enhance sustainability across the full mining life cycle—from exploration to monitoring of closed sites. It develops novel services based on EO and in-situ data to support:
- Raw material exploration using satellite-derived surface motion maps
- Hazard and resilience mapping for critical mining infrastructure
- Monitoring of active and post-mining environments
Terradue’s role is to provide the processing infrastructure for integrating satellite, airborne, and in-situ data. Services include:
- Preprocessing and analysis of satellite data
- Generation of dynamic hazard maps
- Index-based screening tools for sustainability and resilience
- Integration with Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem and openEO APIs
MasterMine: Towards a Digital Twin of the Mine
MasterMine addresses the vision of a fully connected mine of the future, using an Industrial Metaverse (IM) approach to create a digitized representation of mining operations. The project develops an integrated framework combining:
- Real-world data (geophysical, structural, environmental)
- Predictive simulation models
- Industrial IoT and real-time sensing
- Human-centric interfaces for digital mine management
Terradue supports the geospatial intelligence layer of this Industrial Metaverse, providing EO-based monitoring tools that offer:
- Early warning services for terrain instability
- Long-term deformation analysis
- Data-driven event response and area monitoring
These services are accessible via GEP, ensuring efficient access to data and scalable cloud-based processing.
A Common Foundation: GEP and Application Packages
Both Terravision and MasterMine leverage the Geohazards Exploitation Platform as the hosting environment for EO processing services. Using the OGC Best Practice for EO Application Packages, Terradue enables:
- Portable algorithm deployment on cloud and hybrid infrastructures
- Interoperability across different digital platforms and services
- Scalable processing pipelines for high-resolution data analysis
This approach ensures that the EO services developed can be reused in other mining-related platforms or extended into future initiatives, such as European Digital Twins or Copernicus Services.
Supporting Sustainable and Connected Mining
With its contributions to Terravision and MasterMine, Terradue is supporting a shift toward data-driven, sustainable, and digitally integrated mining practices. These projects demonstrate how Earth Observation and cloud-based services can support environmental compliance, operational safety, and raw materials resilience in the mining sector.
For more on the platform and services: