Related Projects
NOVATERRA is dedicated to ensuring food security and promoting access to healthy food for the growing population. Focusing on Mediterranean olive groves and vineyards through a series of case studies, the project aims to explore the possibility of maintaining current yields and quality in Europe and other regions while eliminating or significantly reducing the use of contentious plant protection products, commonly known as pesticides.
The NoPEST project, part of the FetOpen initiative, aims to combat oomycete infections in commercial crops by combining peptide aptamers and precision farming tools. These environmentally friendly solutions seek to address the current reliance on copper-based compounds, offering alternatives that minimize pollution, residual toxicity, and adverse health effects while reducing pesticide usage through innovative molecular and farming approaches.
PestNu aims to transform agriculture through the integration of novel, digital, and space-based technologies (DST) with agro-ecological and organic practices (AOP) in a systemic approach. This approach aims to revolutionize circular economy food production, including aquaponics, hydroponic greenhouses, and open-field vegetable cultivation. By reducing reliance on hazardous pesticides and minimizing nutrient losses from fertilizers, PestNu strives for zero pollution of water, soil, and air while ultimately reducing fertilizer use.
The EU-funded Horizon Europe project SHIELD4GRAPE (S4G) addresses the pressing issues of climate change and environmental degradation affecting Europe and the world. With the EU biodiversity strategy for 2030 as a guiding framework, S4G aims to preserve nature and reverse ecosystem degradation, particularly focusing on the viticulture sector. S4G adopts sustainable agroecological approaches to enhance viticulture’s resilience against pest diseases in the context of climate change.
Cerberus aims to revolutionize pest monitoring with a multi-faceted approach, combining technology, citizen data, and AI algorithms. By providing early detection and targeted spraying recommendations, Cerberus aims to reduce pesticide use and sustainably manage pests in high-value crops across the Mediterranean basin. Cerberus will validate its methodology for three quarantine pests and three commonly managed pests across vineyards, orchards, and citrus plantations, promising to advance sustainable phytosanitary measures and crop protection policies.
The EU project PurPest, running from January 2023 to December 2026 with a budget of €6.472 million, aims to develop a new sensor platform to rapidly detect and stop five different pests during import and in the field to reduce pesticide use by at least 50%. The sensor concept is based on detection of pest-specific volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted by host plants invaded by one or several pests. PurPest will determine the VOC signature of plants attacked by Phytophthora ramorum, Spodoptera frugiperda, Helicoverpa armigera, Halyomorpha halys and Bursaphelenchus xylophilus under different abiotic stress conditions. Coordinated by the Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research (NIBIO), this project is an international collaboration among 18 institutions from 11 European countries.