As a baseline for the development of the SWOS services, the consortium started by defining the requirements for the SWOS technical components, products, toolbox and portal, as well as the preferred method of user engagement. The SWOS user group consists of local, national, regional and global working organisations, ranging from local wetland managing organisations, Ramsar national authorities, MedWet and other regional frameworks, GEO/GEOBON to the secretariat of the Ramsar convention on wetlands.
The SWOS team has actively searched for synergy and alignment with relevant platforms and projects. One such example is the cooperation with the H2020 project ECOPOTENTIAL.
SWOS worked closely and contributed to different GEO initiatives. The GEO-Wetlands initiative, initiated and led by SWOS, was officially approved by the GEO-XIII Plenary in 2016. GEO-Wetlands provides a framework for cooperation and for ensuring the long-term availability of mapping and monitoring services for wetlands.
SWOS provides 4 different service lines and several different service cases:
1) Map and indicator production, which has been demonstrated for about 50 wetland sites in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. SWOS has developed standards for the map production, for nomenclatures and has developed nine wetland indicators and many sub-indicators
2) The Software development, which delivers the freely available toolbox GEOclassifier. The toolbox provides all tools for the production of maps and calculation of indicators. The software is independent and stand alone.
3) There is a SWOS training program and training team available to teach users at different working levels how to produce new maps and indicators. The integration of new satellite-based tools into the daily work needs permanent and solid support.
4) The SWOS / GEO-Wetlands community portal makes available all maps produced in the framework of SWOS. In addition, the portal connects wetland information with freely available European and global layers that are useful for wetland monitoring.
‘Service cases’ have been introduced to demonstrate to users working on local, national and global level how satellite-derived information can be applied and integrated into very different services for planning, management and reporting. The development of service cases has linked the SWOS products to policy processes and assisted identification of issues for the SWOS project to engage with.