Discover the Econect project !

The Econect project officially started on 1st January 2020.

 

This project seizes the opportunity offered by the new technologies of the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence to take a renewed look at the functioning of ecosystems. It is the result of collaboration between six laboratories and three companies in the Toulouse area, bringing complementary skills in environmental sciences, embedded electronics and data processing.

 

Supported by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the University of Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier, the project aims to develop a network of innovative and connected sensors to study and monitor the response of ecosystems to environmental changes.

 

In the Econect project, the team's researchers use environmental sentinel species (bees, birds, aquatic invertebrates) and integrate all the stresses they face. By analysing their response, in parallel on several sites in Occitania, they can thus highlight the integrity or, on the contrary, the alteration of ecosystems; whether they are general trends over long periods of time or events that occur rapidly, such as specific pollution linked to human activities. The aim is to develop one or more multimetric indicators to measure these elements by the end of 2022.

 

Toulouse INP is involved in this project, which includes bird feeders, nesting boxes and connected aquacosms. The integrative ecotoxicology group of the Functional Ecology and Environment Laboratory, based at Toulouse INP-ENSAT, is contributing to this project and the members of this group have recognised expertise in the use of microcosms to assess ecotoxicity in aquatic environments.

 

With Econect, the team proposes automated environmental observatories that make it possible to document the trajectories of different ecosystems without necessarily going into the field. Thanks to the implementation of a network infrastructure for the remote transmission of data from the sentinel systems, the data arrive directly on the researcher's desk. The data can also be pre-processed using algorithms on the server to calculate indicators or generate alarms in case of anomalies in the functioning of an ecosystem. Some data will also be made available to the general public.

 

For more information, visit the official project website :

https://econect.cnrs.fr/

 

Discover the project in video :

Available in french. Kindly use auto translate on Youtube, if needed.

Contact

6 allée Emile Monso - BP 34038
31029 Toulouse Cedex 4

+33 (0)5 34 32 30 00

Contacts

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