From 12th to 14th of February, UDENE consortium met in Ankara, Turkey, to kick-off this new project. Funded through the HORIZON Europe 2022 Space calls managed by EU Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA); the project will last until January 2026. UDENE, standing for Urban Development Explorations Using Natural Experiments, gathers 9 partners, from 6 countries including Tunisia, Turkey, Serbia, Italy, France, and Slovenia, to build sustainable urban environments addressing the challenges posed by increasing urbanisation and the effects of climate change.

UDENE’s main goal is to provide urban visionaries and developers with a virtual laboratory to test the impacts of their assumptions. The Exploration Tool (ET), one of the major project results, will provide scenario-based projections derived from Copernicus Earth Observation (EO) data complemented by relevant in-situ observations.

Sinergise Solutions will lead the first phase of the process, paving the way for building a robust data cube infrastructure and actively participating in the design, development and populating the Data cube with in-situ data from three sites in Tunisia, Turkey and Serbia provided by the consortium partners, as well as data queried from various cloud services, with a focus on Copernicus DIAS services.

For more information read the official press release.

The UDENE consortium is formed by the following partners: WEglobal SRL (Italy), Tunisian Space Agency (Tunisia), TOBB University of Economics and Technology (Turkey), Association Europeenne EURISY (France), BioSense Institute (Serbia), InoSens DOO NOVI SAD (Serbia), Politecnico di Milano (Italy), Sinergise Solutions (Slovenia), and NiK Systems (Turkey).

The project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2023 Research and Innovation Programme under the Grant Agreement No. 101131190.