WISE – From WIdening to urban Sustainability innovation and Excellence – officially started in September 2026 with a kick-off meeting at InnoRenew CoE and the Andrej Marušič Institute of the University of Primorska in Izola, Slovenia.
The four-year Horizon Europe WIDERA project brings together 16 European organisations, including 11 higher-education institutions and five non-academic partners, around urban sustainability as a common platform for research excellence, innovation and institutional development.
For Biodiversity Lab, WISE creates a direct bridge between our work in ecology, Earth observation and spatial analysis and the challenge of making European cities more sustainable and evidence-based.
Giovanni Bacaro represents the University of Trieste in the project Steering Committee and is directly involved in Work Package 3. Our contribution focuses on remote-sensing approaches for analysing and monitoring urban forests, with the aim of producing quantitative information useful for local administrations and sustainable green-space planning.
The work will be developed through three European case studies – Trieste, Porto and Kaunas – allowing us to compare different environmental, climatic and urban contexts and to test approaches that can be transferred to other European cities.
WISE also supports open science, FAIR data, citizen-science engagement, researcher mobility and new international collaborations. For our lab, it is therefore both a research project and an opportunity to connect remote sensing and urban ecology with wider European innovation networks.