DRYADS, A Holistic Fire Management Ecosystem for Prevention, Detection and Restoration of Environmental Disasters

MCS researchers, Assistant Professors Efthymios Altsitsiadis and Isabel Fróes, are CBS participants in the new European Green Deal flagship project, DRYADS. The project will create resilient and informed communities focusing on the forests that are near wildfire risks.

A holistic Fire Management platform will optimize and reuse available socio-technical resources in all three main phases of wildfires – Prevention and preparedness, Detection, Restoration – and real-time risk evaluation tools. The platform will integrate state-of-the-art capabilities drawing from areas like AI, UAV, AR, 5G, Earth Observation, Air Quality and Pollution. Eight pilot implementations will be rolled out in a large-scale demonstration programme that covers seven EU countries and Taiwan. Ultimately the project aims to increase European resilience to disasters and causes of crisis creating a safer environment for its citizens.

The CBS team will be leading the inquiry into the organizational, structural, and sociotechnical factors for the DRYADS Ecosystem Building (WP3). CBS will be leading the WP3 where we will be on the one hand trying to involve user representatives from individual, community, first responders, industrial and commercial providers and policy-makers to identify the optimal form of governance and on the other empowering behavioural change of citizens, local authorities, businesses and schools through clustering and other social techniques. CBS brings its social research background that can provide the insights that can help a largely technical project attend to the softer sides of implementation, and more specifically those that are closer to the citizen (e.g. bottom up / social innovation dimensions that are vital in the project).

The project has 47 collaborative partners from 26 countries. It has a total budget of 22.5 mln Euros, funded under the EU Green Deal Horizon 2020 program, and is coordinated by RISE FIRE RESEARCH in Norway. CBS has a budget of 836k Euros. The project will run for 42 months, from 1st of December 2021 until May 2025.

Read more about the DRYADS project in Cordis or contact Efthymios Altsitsiadis, ea.msc@cbs.dk, for more information.