Project description
Transforming nature into a smart ecosystem monitor
The world is facing severe environmental challenges, with ecosystems like forests under constant threat from problems such as wildfires and biodiversity loss. The degradation of nature is worsening, and we need better ways to monitor and protect the environment. Traditional methods of environmental monitoring are often limited and costly. With this in mind, the EIC-funded EcoSentinel project turns plants into self-sustaining digital sensors. Using the natural energy of plants, EcoSentinel creates a network of ‘smart’ plants that can monitor forests and other ecosystems. This enables a carbon-negative communication system, powered by nature itself, to detect and prevent environmental disasters like wildfires. Through this digital plant network, EcoSentinel aims to protect our planet in a sustainable way.
Objective
The EcoSentinel project envisions a groundbreaking transformation in our relationship with nature to address pressing global sustainability challenges as biosphere integrity degradation, fostering a harmonious coexistence between technological innovation and environmental conservation; culminating in a community of Ecological Sentinels (EcoSentinel).
Specifically, EcoSentinel leverages the biological processes and the resilient nature of living plants to give them the necessary means (i.e. energy harvesting and electromagnetic signal propagation) to become self-sustained digital nodes of a network able to autonomously monitor themselves. This revolutionary approach aims to enhance our capacity to safeguard forests and other ecosystems. The EcoSentinel technology will introduce a carbon-negative wireless communication system, powered by the ecosystem itself, enabling environmental monitoring to prevent and mitigate critical events such as wildfires and biodiversity loss.
The EcoSentinel project proposes a new form of plant-plant interaction by elevating it to a digital level. By enhancing plants’ interconnection through cybernetical implants, we embark on a path to digitally transform the greenery. This unprecedented approach aims to establish a novel wireless plant-based communication system, using plants as natural antennas, uniquely powered by the integration of plant-microbial electricity generation seamlessly blended into the vegetation.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
- medical and health sciencesmedical biotechnologyimplants
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Programme(s)
- HORIZON.3.1 - The European Innovation Council (EIC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-EIC - HORIZON EIC GrantsCoordinator
08022 Barcelona
Spain