FCT NOVA and groundwater quality

More sustainable water management is the focus of MAR2PROTECT, the four-year research project formed by 11 partners from eleven countries and coordinated by FCT NOVA, with the participation of Zabala Innovation.

Funded by Horizon Europe with a budget of 4.14 million euros, MAR2PROTECT will take an integrated approach to prevent, with artificial intelligence tools, groundwater contamination due to climate change.

In this way, the project will collect real-time information from sensors placed in four European countries (Spain, Portugal, Italy, and the Netherlands), Tunisia and South Africa, chosen precisely because of the variety of parameters they present in terms of water sources, climatic conditions, types of contamination, their Water Recharge Management (MAR) scheme and their social and political context.

AI to improve groundwater quality

Ana B. Pereiro and João M. M. Araújo are the researchers from the Portuguese university centre FCT NOVA leading the project. MAR2PROTECT is a multidisciplinary consortium involving seven research and technology organisations, two universities, a technology transfer entity, and an industrial entity.

They all look to adopt innovative digital technologies to improve and strengthen the sustainability of the European water industry. “The key to this project is the decision-making system, which uses artificial intelligence to increase the quality and quantity of groundwater,” says Ana B. Pereiro.

Zabala Innovation and the collaboration with FCT NOVA

Our consultancy firm was present throughout the conceptualisation work of MAR2PROTECT. It played a very active role in the proposal preparation phase, looking at the activities of the consortium partners and searching for the most suitable ones with the help of the innovation platform Kaila. It also helped in drafting the project and negotiating the contract with the European Commission. “Clearly, Zabala Innovation helped us to identify all the key points of the topic that our proposal had to cover, so that we could design the proposal correctly”, concludes Ana B. Pereiro.