GMES user communities were fragmented and incoherent, and, thus, unable to issue common and consolidated views and statements. The GNU project intended to initiate a structuring of the GMES demand side by setting up an independent platform that will become the focal point and mouthpiece of European GMES user needs, and, likewise, foster a systematic dialogue between the stakeholder communities including users, decision makers, and data providers.
EFI was one of the 15 partners forming the consortium and contributed to the systematic exchange of pertinent practical knowledge of GMES, mainly on the basis of experiences from the GSE Forest Monitoring project. EFI helped collating and comparing pertinent documents of previous projects, related to user needs inventories, product portfolios and user evaluations thereof. EFI further contributed to the development of a preliminary annotated database of GMES services and products.