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Integrated emerging approaches for joint protection and restoration of Natural Lakes in the spirit of European life heritage support (ProCleanLakes)

Project description

Innovative solutions to preserve Europe’s natural lakes

Natural lakes across Europe face mounting challenges from chemical contaminants and nutrient enrichment, exacerbated by various human activities. These pressures degrade ecosystem health, threatening biodiversity and water quality. In this context, the EU-funded ProCleanLakes project addresses this crisis by developing integrated nature-based solutions. It aims to restore and protect European Natural Lakes (ENL) through innovative approaches that harmonise economic, environmental, and social interests. Specifically, the project applies transdisciplinary approaches across multiple affected sites to demonstrate scalable solutions. An innovative support platform merges AI and citizen science, empowering communities in lake protection and restoration. ProCleanLakes pioneers tools like mobile decision support systems and AI analytics, ensuring a holistic impact and replicability across Europe’s natural lake ecosystems.

Objective

ProCleanLakes targets to combat the combined impact of various disruptive factors that generate continuous pressure on the lake's ecosystem status and facilitate the accumulation of emerging, non-regulated, chemical contaminants and nutrient enrichment. The project will design and demonstrate the feasibility of integrated nature-based emerging approaches for joint protection and restoration of European Natural Lakes (ENL) and their biodiversity, considering scenarios which imply the presence of various pressures that affect the aquatic ecosystems' status. The holistic transdisciplinary approaches that are to be used in the project, based on the synergic effect of the economic-environment-social nexus, targets to support the improvement of ENL ecological and chemical status in association with major EU instruments, sustainable development goals and policies related to freshwater ecosystems. The project engages multiple sites affected by the presence of various pressures and stressors, that will be the subjects for the demonstration of integrated protection and restoration solutions efficiency. A replication roadmap powered by the necessity of assuring upscaling and universality of the optimal integrated solutions (IS) will be developed to prove the replicability. An IS support platform which merges a business accelerator with an adaptive artificial intelligence (AI) solution for empowering citizen science related to lakes protection and restoration will assure the collaboration between the municipalities and citizens and will offer capacity-building and encourage co-development and co-design towards natural lakes protection and restoration. Tools such as mobile decision support platforms, serious games for digital readiness, e-learning and augmented-based modules for reinforce-learning and multiple AI machine learning analytical frameworks will be developed to assure the synergic approach toward the maximization of integrated solutions impact and replicability.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

Keywords

Programme(s)

Topic(s)

Funding Scheme

HORIZON-IA - HORIZON Innovation Actions

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Call for proposal

(opens in new window) HORIZON-MISS-2023-OCEAN-01

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Coordinator

UNIVERSITAET FUER BODENKULTUR WIEN
Net EU contribution
€ 936 338,75
Address
GREGOR MENDEL STRASSE 33
1180 Wien
Austria
Region
Ostösterreich Wien Wien
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
€ 936 338,75

Participants (16)

Partners (1)