As UNESCO world heritage city shaped by the role of water, the city of Bruges is also particularly vulnerable to water risks and calls for a holistic and preventative approach optimising the green-blue strategic management. Acknowledging the inner canals are vital to make the city climate change resilient, the Blue4Green project aims at improving the quality and quantity of water supply to mitigate flood, drought and water stress risks. This EUI-IA project uses technological innovations to monitor and correct green and blue water flows in the cities, safeguarding Bruges’ world heritage city, and keeping the city and its residents cool in hot summers. We are involved to analyse historical satellite data on health status of trees, and to monitor tree health and water status over summer using thermal and multispectral drone imagery.

The Drowned Villages of the Scheldt project explores a remarkable yet vulnerable landscape in the Eastern Scheldt estuary. Hidden beneath the tidal flats lie the remains of late medieval villages that once thrived on reclaimed land. These villages, now submerged, offer unique time capsules that provide insight into how people lived with and shaped a dynamic coastal environment. The projects tests and develops tools for documenting and preserving drowned landscapes in tidal and underwater zones. This includes a UAV-based approach, in which we equip our drones with magnetometer sensors, flying at very low heights above the surface.

FOODTure is a Horizon Europe RIA Project that focuses on the sustainability of our food systems. By developing Europe’s largest database of Life Cycle Inventories (LCIs) for food products and integrating technologies like satellite data, drone monitoring, and spatial analysis, FOODTURE makes the invisible impacts of food visible. This empowers farmers, businesses, policymakers, and researchers to make better-informed decisions – from field to fork. Our role in the project is to lead a Work Package in which remote sensing databases and technologies are integrated in the LCA methodology.

The VLIR-UOS Short Initiatives project “Establishing hyperspectral sensing and processing skills for research on climate- and diseaseresistant crops and trees in South Africa” focuses on transferring essential skills on hyperspectral laboratory and UAV-based imaging. he project’s central goal is to develop local skills and capacity through partnerships with Ghent University to establish hyperspectral sensing technologies for deployment in plant breeding and remote sensing. Transferable skills are not limited to hyperspectral sensing, but include training in big data management and processing.

GOOD is a Horizon Europe project that aims to co-create, test, assess and demonstrate innovative and sustainable Agroecological Weed Management (AWM) solutions & to encourage a long-term and large-scale transition to sustainable biodiversity-based agri-food systems through the development of the first Agroecological Weed Management Network (AWMN). We are involved to develop a method that can automatically identify, classify and map weeds based on high resolution RGB and multispectral drone imagery.

FOLOU is a Horizon Europe projected focusing on monitoring and reducing food losses. As one of the project partners, the URC is coordinating a work package on the development and validation of innovative tools to measure and estimate food losses. We will directly measurements of yield and yield losses in fruit orchards and vegetables, using high resolution RGB drone images. Further, we will also contribute to estimating yield losses in potato with remote sensing technology.

CLIMABIS is a VLAIO-funded project between Ghent University and Globachem. The project includes an IPM approach to control climate-intensified biotic and abiotic stress in wheat. We will try to manage yellow rust and drought stress through a three-step approach. First, prevention by using biocontrol agents and biostimulants. Next, setting up a method to monitor the condition of crops through UAV-mounted hyperspectral and thermal cameras. And lastly, according to the principles of precision agriculture, intervention with biological products combined with a reduced amount of chemical pesticides in the affected areas of the field.

With UAV snapshot cameras, the same area is observed manifold and under a variety of different viewing angles. The standard UAV image processing software only use one of these observations to create the orthophotos – all other observations are discarded. Yet, these multi-angular data actually reveal very relevant information on canopy properties. In the SMAC (Simultaneous Measurements of leaf Area and Chlorophyll) project, we use the full multi-angular observation to generate maps of leaf area and chlorophyll content, two parameters of immediate use for precision agriculture applications.

COMP4DRONES is an ECSEL JU project coordinated by Indra that brings together a consortium of 50 partners with the aim of providing a framework of key enabling technologies for safe and autonomous drones. It brings to bear a holistically designed ecosystem from application to electronic components, realized as a tightly integrated multi-vendor and compositional UAV embedded architecture solution and a tool chain complementing the compositional architecture principles.

ANALYST PV is an imec.icon research project funded by imec, Innoviris and Agentschap Innoveren & Ondernemen. The project aims at developing a fault diagnosis framework for PV power plants that relies on IoT sensors, AI-enabled root cause analysis and automatic image analysis. The ultimate goal is to optimize photovoltaic asset management and performance.