You might assume that pest-borne diseases are relics that belong to the past, but you can’t ignore that mosquito’s, ticks, rodents, fleas, bedbugs, cockroaches and several other very well know pests are often bothering you. And surely you did not remain unaffected when the news about Zika virus, spread during the latest Olympic games, was threatening the future lives of unborn children. We currently witness important changes in ecology, climate & human behaviour that favour the development of urban pests. Global travel and trade, urbanisation and environmental challenges are causing pest related human diseases to emerge. Avia-GIS is aiming to prevent pests from disturbing our lives wherever we are! Most pest controllers still limit their interventions to reactive control using harsh chemicals in a ‘carpet bombing’ setting despite EU regulations 2014, imposing to revert to proactive Integrated Pest Management (IPM) principles. Avia-GIS is a leading Belgian innovative SME established in 2001 who has built research and public authority trust over the past 17 years and developed a unique, disruptive software suite - VECMAP® - that will support society to overcome one of its important health threats, the spreading of Pests of Public Health importance. Avia-GIS grew steadily by 17% per year, having now an annual turn-over of 2M€ and employing 15 highly specialised staff members. With the help of the H2020 Instrument, we will be able to add IPM functionalities and bring VECMAP®IPM to the market. Within 5 years Avia-GIS will enable 3.200 SME pest controllers and 3.600 local authorities to shift to IPM strategies. With the grant we will raise revenue from 2 M€ to 22 M€ in 2023 and headcount from 15 to 58 in 2023 and contribute to the scaling of 7 resellers in Europe. The H2020 grant is an essential component of our second investment round that will allow us to attract the needed additional private investment money upon signature of the EC grant.

During the summer of 2018, the EU experienced the worst outbreak of West Nile Virus (WNV) in history, with more than 1317 infected and 142 deaths reported. WNV can cause a fatal neurological disease in humans, for which there is no known therapy or vaccine. WNV is just one of the many Vector-Borne Diseases transmitted by mosquitoes (Dengue, Zika, Yellow Fever, Malaria, etc.) threatening Europe due to climate change. VECTRACK addresses this major problem through early detection and prevention of disease outbreaks, the key pillars in preventive control strategy. Obtaining high quality field information is notoriously costly and time-consuming. To effectively control these disease-vectors, specialized public and private bodies implement laborious and costly surveillance programs, where manual field trap inspections represent 95% of total costs. These costs can be significantly reduced through combining cost-efficient sampling strategies, remote sensing and spatial modelling techniques resulting in risk maps for targeted surveillance and risk assessments. VECTRACK will provide the first transnational and automated vector surveillance system, a long sought objective of the World Health Organization (WHO), the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). This will be achieved through the development of an Earth Observation (EO) Satellite Sentinel service, including ground nodes with new optoelectronic sensors allowing fully remote and automated counting and classification of the target mosquitoes (sex, species, age and infection potential). VECTRACK will be commercialized as a service to the market segments already serviced by the industry partners, and new international clients. This will be achieved through the development of an innovative business plan, an extensive market demonstration and the implementation of a knowledge management and protection strategy for the exploitation of the technology in Europe and other international markets.

For the past 15 years, European beekeepers have been reporting weakening bee numbers and colony losses. The situation is worsening as according to a recent study of the European Union Reference Laboratory for honeybee health, some countries are losing up to a third of their colonies every year. Honey bees are essential in the pollination of many agricultural crops and concerns have been raised about the ability to maintain the pollination services required to ensure pollinator dependent food production. Nowadays European citizens consider the decline in bee numbers to be the most serious environmental issue – more than climate change. The IoBee consortium wants to disrupt the beekeeping market by reducing colony losses by at least 50%! Through this project, we aim to pilot and commercialise a new Internet of Things (IoT) sensor application that can automatically assess the threat status to a colony. The system will wirelessly transmit results to a cloud server, making field data available for running prediction models, perform risk assessments, issue warnings and make historical analysis using a SDSS- Spatial Decision Support System. This will allow beekeepers to be active participants in colony surveillance programmes with unprecedented accuracy and responsiveness, and as a result, unhealthy or threatened colonies will be remotely detected earlier with greater precision, saving millions of Euros in potential losses. Many systems to monitor beehives already exist in the market. However there are 3 main gaps in the SoA: 1) No solution can i) “fingerprint” individual bees and determine if they are healthy or have a problem (disease, poisoning, etc.), ii) identify bee castes, and iii) identify pest insects that attack hives. 2) No solution offers IoT capability, nor follows standards that could enable establishing the first interoperable surveillance network in Europe. 3) No solution has a SDSS, which is paramount to an advanced EU surveillance system

The WHO estimates that vector-borne diseases (VBD) account for more than 17% of all infectious diseases. Every year, more than 2.5 billion people are at risk of contracting dengue alone, and VBDs cause almost 1 million deaths. In the last decades several species of invasive disease carrying mosquitoes have invaded the northern hemisphere of the planet through the transport of goods, increasing international travel and climate change. In 2018 a West Nile fever outbreak transmitted by mosquitoes occurred in the EU. For this disease there are no vaccines or medications. There were 1503 cases reported in 11 countries, and 181 deaths. VBD Mobile Bio-Labs could have assisted health authorities in containing this outbreak, reducing cases and preventing deaths. Unfortunately such a system does not exist. MOBVEC will be the first VBD Mobile Bio-Lab, providing: 1- Automatic information about vector populations, obtained in real-time by smart-traps, powered by machine-learning and edge computing: insect species, sex, age, and viral infection. 2- GEOSS compliant vector risk maps of adult insects and eggs/larvae, built on field + Copernicus data; 3- GEOSS compliant disease transmission models in mosquito populations, fusing data from Copernicus, clinical and diagnostic data of reference labs, and vector risk maps; 4- GEOSS compliant citizen-science platform to reinforce the surveillance of mosquitoes using citizens as observation nodes. 5- VBD mobile bio-lab with the capacities of points 1, 2, 3 and 4 + VBD Epidemiological maps and forecast models, to be rapidly operational in the heart of outbreaks to assist first-responders. This technology will the first line of defence against disease vectors worldwide, help prevent and fight devastating disease outbreaks, and will save lives while saving millions of euros in healthcare and lost working-hours. This has never been done before, and our consortium has the interdisciplinary research capacities to make it a reality.