Periodic Reporting for period 1 - STELLA (Digital technologies for plant health, early detection, territory surveillance and phytosanitary measures)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2024-01-01 do 2025-06-30
Climate change, globalisation of trade, changes in land use, and the intensification of agriculture are accelerating the emergence and spread of plant pests and diseases. These threats endanger not only agricultural productivity and forest ecosystems but also biodiversity, and long-term food security. In recent years, outbreaks of invasive plant pests have caused billions of euros in crop losses and forest degradation across Europe alone. Despite the growing urgency, existing plant health monitoring systems are often fragmented, lack interoperability, and are not well adapted for early detection, rapid response, or multi-actor collaboration. There is an urgent need for more integrated, flexible, and technology-driven strategies to effectively and sustainably address plant health challenges. The STELLA Horizon EU project addresses this challenge by developing an innovative, collaborative platform designed for surveillance and management of plant health risks. It targets a wide range of users, including public authorities, researchers, land managers, farmers, and other stakeholders, aiming to improve early warning and rapid response capabilities against harmful plant organisms. These include both regulated quarantine pests (QP) and non-quarantine pests (RNQP), which threaten crop yields, ecosystem stability, and economic sustainability. STELLA’s primary objective is to strengthen national and transnational capacities by creating an integrated Plant Surveillance System (STELLA PSS). This system will combine state-of-the-art technologies such as remote sensing, in-situ sensors, mobile applications, artificial intelligence, and pest prediction models to support real-time data collection, analysis, and coordinated action. To maximise its impact, STELLA will test and validate its system in diverse real-world environments, such as orchards, vineyards, and forested landscapes, covering a wide range of crops, ecosystems, and pest scenarios. The project is designed to contribute directly to several key EU priorities, including the European Green Deal, the Farm to Fork Strategy, the EU Biodiversity Strategy, and the Plant Health Law. Overall, STELLA will deliver practical tools, policy recommendations, and validated methodologies that can be adopted beyond the project’s lifetime, contributing to long-term plant health resilience.
During the first 18 months, the STELLA project made significant progress towards developing and validating its Pest Surveillance System (PSS). The consortium established standardized protocols for data collection, integrating remote sensing, IoT, proximal sensing, and citizen science, which now serve as the foundation for AI-based detection and forecasting models. The first operational prototype of the STELLA PSS was delivered, featuring mockups and robust backend services, with CKAN adopted as the core data management infrastructure to ensure interoperability with EU standards. It will soon also host the first learning materials generated from the project. All six Use Case Pilots (UCPs) across Europe and New Zealand were successfully established, with baseline assessments completed, monitoring equipment deployed, and initial data collection underway. Early AI modelling and testing activities have been initiated, and preliminary pest detection and prediction tools are under validation. On the policy side, a comprehensive analysis based on 81 interviews was conducted, identifying barriers and enablers to digital technology adoption in plant health, while capacity-building workshops supported stakeholder readiness and engagement. Communication and dissemination objectives were fully met, including the launch of a multi-channel outreach strategy, training activities, and identification of key exploitable results. Overall, the project is on track, demonstrating significant achievements in technical development, pilot implementation, stakeholder engagement, and policy analysis, thereby laying a solid foundation for scalable and sustainable digital pest surveillance solutions.
In its first 18 months, STELLA has laid the groundwork for advancing pest surveillance beyond the current state of the art by setting up pilots, initiating large-scale data collection, and addressing critical technical and organisational challenges. A major milestone has been the definition of the platform’s technical specifications and making it operational, ensuring a solid basis for subsequent integration of its 3 subsystems advanced tools. Particular emphasis was given to clarifying the full data flow, from pilot-level acquisition to storage and processing, a complex task given the multidimensional nature of the datasets involved. Equally important has been the establishment of effective communication channels and workflows among the responsible partners, a prerequisite for ensuring repeatability of the methodology and for building future platforms of similar scope. These achievements position STELLA to move confidently towards the next stages, where the integration of AI, IoT, and multi-source sensing technologies will deliver real-time forecasting, detection, and response to plant pests, fostering policy uptake and supporting the reduction of pesticide reliance.