Dr. Nektarios Chrysoulakis is a Director of Research, at the Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH) in Heraklion, Greece. He holds a BSc in Physics, a MSc in Environmental Physics and PhD in Remote Sensing from the University of Athens. He has been involved in R&D projects funded from organizations such as the European Union, the European Space Agency and the Ministries of Environment, Development, Culture and Education. He has considerable experience in the area of Earth Observation and GIS. His main research interests include urban research, urban energy balance, natural and technological risk analysis, thermal infrared imagery and surface temperature studies, environmental monitoring and change detection. He is the coordinator of the H2020 project URBANFLUXES. The main goal of this project is to prepare the ground for innovative exploitation of European space data in scientific activities and future and emerging applications by exploiting the improved data quality, coverage and revisit times of the Copernicus Sentinels data. URBANFLUXES, based on Sentinels observations, will reveal novel scientific insights, related to monitoring the anthropogenic heat flux in cities, at both local and regional scales, generating new satellite opportunities. He is also the Coordinator of the ERA.Net-RUS Plus project SEN4RUS, aiming at developing indicators that effectively and efficiently exploit the information content provided by Copernicus Sentinels mass data streams in support of city and regional planning in Russia. Dr. Chrysoulakis was the Coordinator of the FP7 projects BRIDGE, dealing with Urban Metabolism and GEOURBAN, dealing with the development and on-line evaluation of satellite-based indicators for urban planning and management. He also participates in the H2020 project ECOPOTENTIAL with mail goal to create a new unified framework for ecosystem studies and management of protected areas; and in the LIFE+ project FLIRE, focuses on the development of an integrated Decision Support System for both flash floods and forest fires risk assessment and management. He has more than 180 publications in per-review journals and conference proceeding. Link to full CV: http://works.bepress.com/chrysoulakis/.

Zina Mitraka is currently a PhD student in the Geoinformation programme of the Tor Vergata University of Rome and a research assistant in FORTH. She has a degree of Applied Mathematics (University of Crete, Greece) and an MSc on Environmental Engineering (Technical University of Crete, Greece). Her scientific interests mainly concern the study of urban environment using multispectral and hyperspectral optical and thermal data with focus on algorithms development for biophysical parameters estimation. She is responsible for the project management and dissemination, as well as the adaptation of the URBANFLUXES methodology to the Sentinels.

Dimitris Poursanidis Dimitris Poursanidis is a Research Fellow in FORTH and a PhD student in the Marine Ecology programme of the University of the Aegean (Greece). He has a degree on Environmental Management (Higher Technological Institute of Crete, Greece) and an M.Sc. on Integrated Coastal Zone Management (University of the Aegean, Greece). His scientific interests mainly concern the study of natural environment using satellite optical data, species distribution modelling and the spatial distribution of the benthic assemblages in the Mediterranean reef ecosystems. He is a GIS analyst/cartographer and assists the EO and GIS tasks in URBANFLUXES.

Stavros Stagakis is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Applied and Computational Mathematics (IACM) at the Foundation of Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH). He received his diploma in Biological Applications and Technology from the University of Ioannina in 2005. During 2006-2009 he worked in two research projects as a PhD candidate in the same department. In 2010 he worked in the Instituto de Agricultura Sostenible (IAS, Cordoba, Spain) and in 2012 he received his PhD in monitoring land ecosystem dynamics using remote sensing techniques. During 2012-2015 he worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the University of Ioannina and the National Observatory of Athens. His scientific interests include land ecosystem monitoring using multispectral and hyperspectral data, species distribution mapping, multiple stresses detection and climate change effects on land ecosystems, primary productivity modelling using satellite and meteorological data. In URBANFLUXES, he will focus on combining EO and urban climate methodologies to derive urban energy budget fluxes from Copernicus Sentinels synergistic observations.

Nektarios Spyridakis is an Electrical Engineer in the Institute of Oceanography of the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research (HCMR), an associate of the Institute of Applied and Computational Mathematics (IACM) of the Foundation of Research and Technology (FORTH) and an associate teacher at the TEI of Crete (Department of Electrical Engineering). He has a BSc in Electrical Engineering (TEI of Crete, 1995) and a MSc in Coastal Zone Management (University of the Aegean, 2005). He has a long time experience on scientific equipment (sonar, meteorological, laboratory, optical) maintenance, development and repair, in measurement devices and software development and in developing Virtual Instruments (LabVIEW) for data analysis and high accuracy measurement devices and systems. Such applications involve hydroacoustic equipment and software, ROV, undulatory fin prototype, meteorological stations, plant diseases software (under evaluation). He has been recently involved in robotics studies in the Archimedes-III project (TEI of Crete) and is currently involved in bio-optical studies in the Aegean Sea and the Black Sea (EuroFleets) and in meteorological and air pollution measurements network in the UrbanFluxes scientific project. He is a LabVIEW developer since 1994, with testimonials since 2006.

George Kochilakis is a R&D engineer in the Regional Analysis Division of the Institute of Applied and Computational Mathematics, FORTH. He holds a M.Sc. in Computer Vision and Robotics and Parallel and Distributed Computer Systems from the University of Crete, Department of Computer Science (1994) and two B.S. one in Mathematics from the University of Crete (1988), and the other in Computer Science (1991) from the same University. His main research interests include Relational Databases Applications, client server systems and Geographic Information Systems, Applications in the World Wide Web environment using relational databases and Geographic Information Systems.

Nikos Manioudakis is a project manager in the Regional Analysis Division of the Institute of Applied and Computational Mathematics, FORTH. He holds a M.Sc. in Informatics and Operations Research from the University of Athens (1985) and a B.S. in Physics from the University of Athens, Department of Physics (1982). His main research interests include GIS and databases applications development, Surveys planning, evaluation and analysis.