If we had to sum up OSTARA in one sentence, it would be this: agroecology works, but it needs data to scale. Mediterranean soils have been sending warning signs for decades - erosion, salinization, loss of organic matter - and we know agroecological practices can reverse much of that damage. What's been missing is a common, reliable, and accessible way to measure, compare, and share how a soil is really doing.
That's what OSTARA is about: Operationalizing Agroecology for Resilient Mediterranean Agriculture, a PRIMA-funded project with a very concrete goal: taking agroecology from theory to the field, with digital tools that any farmer, including smallholders, can use without needing to be a tech expert.
How are we going to do it?
The project rests on four main pillars:
- A low-cost Edge-IoT sensor kit, open-source and built on Arduino and FIWARE, capable of measuring physical, chemical, and biological soil indicators in real time, even without a stable internet connection.
- A common ontology to unify soil data currently scattered across dozens of different formats and sources, from LUCAS to ISRIC.
- Trustworthy and Explainable AI models (TAI/XAI), trained through federated learning, to help predict soil condition, carbon sequestration, or crop yield without compromising the privacy of each farm's data.
- Low-power distributed ledger technologies (green DLTs) to ensure that the data collected is traceable and tamper-proof, without the energy cost associated with traditional blockchains.
All of this will be tested in 4 Living Labs located in Morocco, Cyprus, France, and Spain, each representing a different type of Mediterranean farming system: from subsurface irrigation in permanent pastures to digital twins applied to organic farming.
Who's behind it?
OSTARA brings together 9 partners from 6 countries: the University of Salamanca (USAL) and AIR Institute, in Spain; AETHON Engineering Single Member P.C., in Greece; SK EMBIO Diagnostics LTD, in Cyprus; the University of Ibn Zohr (UIZ), in Morocco; the Arab Academy for Science, Technology & Maritime Transport (AASTMT) and Heliopolis University (HU), in Egypt; and JASSP together with the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne (URCA), in France. A very diverse mix of universities, research centers, and technology SMEs, coordinated by the USAL led by Dr. Javier Prieto.
What happens next?
The results will be published openly through a data portal, so that researchers, technicians, public authorities, and above all farmers can use them well beyond the project's lifetime. Because if there's one thing OSTARA is clear about, it's that the sustainability of Mediterranean soils isn't a single country's problem, or a single project's task - it's a shared one.