WaterGrid

WaterGrid

Illegal excavation, aggregate extraction, and waste dumping in Natura 2000 protected floodplains cause irreversible ecological damage — yet detection relies on infrequent field inspections that arrive weeks after the fact.

WaterGrid closes this gap with an automated, satellite-driven detection system that flags anthropogenic disturbances in protected riparian zones within days — not months. When a multi-temporal anomaly crosses statistical threshold against a 12-month baseline, WaterGrid automatically generates a structured incident report with georeferenced evidence, ready for submission to environmental authorities.

Pilot site: ROSCI0434 Siretul Mijlociu, Romania — 107 Sentinel-2 scenes processed, 24 months of continuous monitoring. Any Natura 2000 site in Europe can be onboarded by uploading a boundary file. All 27 EU member states have Natura 2000 obligations. WaterGrid scales to all of them.

🛰️ EU Space Technologies

Sentinel-2 MSI — 10-metre resolution, 5-day revisit, SCL cloud masking. Accessed through open STAC APIs, reproducible and extensible across the EU. Galileo UAV ground-truth validation on roadmap.

💧 EU Space for Water

Challenge #2 — Tracking and Preventing Water Pollution. Copernicus CEMS activates post-disaster. WaterGrid activates pre-damage. Primary users: environmental protection agencies and river basin authorities. Secondary: Natura 2000 site managers, municipal water authorities, civil society organizations monitoring EU Habitats Directive compliance.