Project B

🦫 Project B: Unlocking the Earth's Lost Sponges

💧Challenge: Water crisis and renaturalization costs 

Poland is facing extreme droughts and floods, which strike with redoubled force following the draining of 85% of our natural wetlands. In 2024 alone, floods generated 5 billion EURO in damages. Simultaneously, the EU Nature Restoration Law (NRL) imposes an obligation to restore ecosystems. However, conventional renaturalization using heavy machinery is a massive expense, averaging 100,000 EURO per kilometer of river. Public water management authorities, starting with our initial target Wody Polskie, need a low-cost, scalable solution to achieve these legal goals without breaking budgets.

💎Solution: NBS (Nature-Based Solutions) and ecosystem services 

The answer lies in transitioning to self-regulating natural resources (NBS), perfectly executed by the Eurasian beaver. The dams they build serve as free hubs of ecosystem services, replacing the work of human engineers:

• Retention: Floodplains drastically slow down precipitation runoff, reducing flood peaks and rebuilding groundwater reserves for times of drought.
• Filtration: Swamp buffer zones act as natural settling tanks, capturing agricultural nitrates and phosphates, protecting rivers from degradation and toxic blooms.

🌐Technology: The "Project B" App

Our system is an intelligent map based on satellite data (Copernicus) and habitat models. We transform orbital observations into actionable recommendations, precisely pinpointing the best locations for free retention:

• Sponge Index: Using data from Sentinel-2 and Copernicus DEM, the algorithm searches for potential "sponges." It highlights wastelands with an optimal hydrological profile and the highest water absorption potential at the lowest investment costs.
• Beaver Index: Analyzes habitat potential. It assesses migration opportunities from current sites, predicting which locations identified by the Sponge Index will be settled the fastest and most willingly by these ecosystem engineers.

🚀Future Development Roadmap

Project B has immense scaling potential. In upcoming phases, we plan to implement:

• Conflict of interest management: Algorithms that precisely identify and exclude key infrastructure and valuable agricultural lands to minimize the risk of damages.
• Ecological corridor networks: Integrating the model with local and pan-European migration routes, supporting the biodiversity of the entire continent.
• Phytoremediation: Identifying locations with specific biological purification needs, where beavers' ecosystem services will bring the greatest relief to polluted environments.

ℹ️Details

🛰️ EU space technologies

We use Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS) and Copernicus Digital Elevation Model (CDEM) data to estimate the Sponge Index and Beaver Index.

🇪🇺 EU Space for Water

We are addressing Challenge #3: Disaster risk monitoring by leveraging Copernicus satellite data to shift from reactive disaster response to proactive, nature-based disaster prevention. Our platform identifies "potential sponges", degraded landscapes with high water-absorption potential, and overlays them with beaver habitat models to pinpoint the most cost-effective locations for ecosystem restoration. By guiding these natural engineers to optimal sites, we provide water authorities with a resilient adaptation strategy that naturally flattens flood peaks and rebuilds groundwater reserves for times of drought.

Technologies used

Copernicus LMS, Copernicus DEM, Google Earth Engine, MERIT Hydro, HydroSHEDS

💻Links 

GitHub: https://github.com/furmanator67/project-b-v0

App: https://v0-project-b-v0.vercel.app/

🤼 Team

Andrzej Kotulski (Backend & infra) - Staff software engineer at Oscilar (AML compliance scale-up), ex-Facebook. Makes sure all the heavy data processing runs smoothly behind the scenes.

Ania Kwiecień (SME) - Landscape architect at IKROPKA and domain expert in renaturalization. She’s our reality check - making sure our satellite maps actually make sense for nature, and translating complex ecology into plain language for the developers.

Kuba Kwiecień (Lead, Team coordinator for EUSPA contact) - Co-founder of LUPA Labs startup (AI tool for scientists) and AI engineer. Keeps the whole team on track and figures out how to turn our tech into a real business case that governments will actually buy.

Michał Bogdan (Analyst) - Assistant professor at IM PAN, soft matter and fluid dynamics expert. Builds the math and models that actually figure out where the beavers should go.

Paweł Furmanowski (Frontend) - Front-end lead at PhixFlow (analytics scale-up). Makes sure public planners can easily access and understand our solution through a clean, easy-to-navigate app.