Future Needs participated in the SmartVitinet’s kick-off meeting that took place in Athens, Greece, on the 16th and 17th of January, 2023.
The SmartVitiNet project, standing for Smart and Sustainable Drone-assisted Viticulture Excellence Network, will (a) scale up, pilot and bring to the market an innovative holistic phytosanitary and plant protection system based on the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, new observational platforms, and new ready to use sensors, and (b) establish a Competence Center for Precision Viticulture. SmartVitiNet addresses several smart specialisation priorities of regions involved and is expected to have significant impacts on regional and EU sectors of Agriculture, Health, Environment, and ICT.
In the SmartVitinet’s kick-off meeting all partners were welcomed by our coordinator in the Agricultural University of Athens, where we had the chance to discuss the current status of all the activities, identify the challenges ahead, and plan our actions for the next three years of the project, emphasising on the work that must be done in the coming six months, until our next transnational meeting. Furthermore, we clarified some points and got to meet our Project Officer, Mr. Erik Hengmith, and Mr. Tomislav Pinter from the European Commission, who were kind enough to join us for the two-days kick-off meeting and share a presentation linked to the project, the Interregional Innovation Investments (I3) Instrument and the related goals of the European Commission.
Last but not least, it was a short but inclusive kick-off meeting that gave us the opportunity to finally meet in person, and marked the beginning of an extremely interesting and important project for the Green Transition. We look forward to meeting again and discussing SmartVitiNet’s progress in the near future.
Stay tuned for more exciting news from our project, and in case you want to learn more about SmartVitiNet you can visit the Projects section on our website.