New, 2026-11-03

NextBON holds its kick-off meeting in Copenhagen

Sheet of paper taped to a dark green wooden door reading 'NextBON, 28-29/10/2026 Kick-off Meeting'.

NextBON, the Next Generation Biodiversity Observation Network, a Horizon Europe project funded under call HORIZON-CL6-2025-01, held its kick-off meeting on 28–29 October 2026, hosted by the University of Copenhagen, the project coordinator.

The project started on 1 October 2026 and runs for 48 months. The consortium includes 22 institutions from 16 countries. NextBON develops a tiered blueprint for biodiversity monitoring in Europe:

Tier 1: EU-wide satellite imagery to track ecosystem and land cover trends
Tier 2: national and habitat-specific assessments of priority species and communities
Tier 3: intensive local field studies with IoT sensors, eDNA and genomics

The work is organised in eight work packages.

The University of Florence takes part in NextBON with geoLAB, the Laboratory of Forest Geomatics of the Department of Agriculture, Food, Environment and Forestry (DAGRI). geoLAB is responsible for the component on the use of multi-source Earth Observation tools for biodiversity monitoring.

Thank you to the University of Copenhagen for hosting! More about the project: nextbon.eu.