University of Glasgow researchers contribute to European Research Council-funded Geo-AI project

Researchers from the University of Glasgow are part of a team who have received new funding from the European Research Council. The team's project is one of 55 new initiatives funded by the EU's research and innovation programme, Horizon Europe. Professor Ana Basiri and PhD candidate Petrus Gerrits, of the School of Geographical & Earth Sciences, are leading Glasgow's contribution to a project led by colleagues from Koç University in Turkey, which involves a network of collaborators from across Europe. Over the next 18 months, the researchers will collaborate to create new geospatial artificial intelligence-based land use and land cover models of Bulgaria and Turkey. The models will be used to estimate rural depopulation, agricultural land abandonment, and deforestation, where existing data are sparse or unavailable. They will also project how those changes may continue until 2040. The team will develop an advanced, reproducible, open, and customisable geospatial artificial intelligence-based land use land cover segmentation process to accurately map land use and land cover conditions in Europe using historical aerial photographs and satellite images, geotagged historical population census data and wide ranges of datasets.