Seed Fund Grants 2022 October

By Dr. Akshit Gupta
Faculty of CEG

The Report: click here

GreenScan: an AI-powered Drone-Based Urban Green Health Monitoring System
Urban greenery is experiencing an atypical amount of natural and human-induced stresses affecting its survival and the current methods for monitoring it are riddled with various challenges involving scalability and quality of assessment. We are developing an opportunistic mobile system for autonomously measuring the health of urban trees with high spatio-temporal resolutions at low costs. Large-scale deployment of this technique will enable effective management of urban greenery health for cities and municipalities around the world.

By Dr. Junzi Sun
Faculty of AE

The Report, click here
 

MOCHA - Multidisciplinary Open Collaborations on High Altitude Contrail Detection With Aviation and Satellite Data Fusion
The project is focused on the Climate Action Programme’s climate change mitigation theme. It addresses aviation’s environmental footprint, where contrails are estimated to account for half of the global warming effects induced by all flight emissions. Contrails are also likely to become a more dominant issue for future aviation that relies on hydrogen combustion.
MOCHA aims at forming a small consortium with external industrial partners on remote sensing and flight data, and providing an open platform of contrail data and cloud-base labeling tool to support future research on the environmental impact of contrails.

By Dr. Thom Bogaard
Faculty of CEG

The Report: will follow soon
 

Sponge campus: creating climate-proof campus with innovative, vegetation-based sustainable drainage systems for research and education
This project will establish an experimental, vegetation-based Sustainable Drainage System on Campus. This initiative aims to facilitate research, practice, and educational activities for eco-based sustainable urban water management. It will focus on managing water cycle, its water quality and its role in spreading of vector-born diseases. Moreover, it aims to become the nucleus of Nature Based Solution (NBS) research and educational projects where quantitative knowledge of eco-hydrological behaviour is pivotal.

By Dr. Marc Schleiss
Faculty of CEG

The Report: click here
 

OpenRainGuru – A free, AI-based nowcasting tool for heavy precipitation
RainGuru (https://rainguru.tudelft.nl/) is a new machine learning model for short-term prediction of rainfall in the Netherlands. Unlike Buienradar, which everyone knows but is proprietary, RainGuru was developed by TU students and is completely free and open source. It does not store any personal information, does not track its users and offers unique functionalities such as the ability to compare forecasts to actual observations. The official release in 2022 triggered a lot of interest. In 2023, we will use the seed funds from the Climate Action program to clean up, document and push the RainGuru code to a public repository from where others will be able to use it and contribute to its development. The outcome will be an easily findable, accessible, interoperable and re-usable (FAIR) open-source library in Python that students and researchers at TU Delft can use to get hands-on-experience in using AI-driven solutions to solve urgent problems related to extreme rain and flooding in a changing climate. We foresee strong links to the three flagships "urban flow", "sponge cities", and "AI for climate" of the Climate Action Programme as well as long-term collaboration with the TU Delft AI initiative (e.g., the Aidrolab) and the Ruisdael observatory for atmospheric science.

By Dr. Juliette Cortes Arevalo
Faculty of TPM

The Reporting: click here
 

Serious gaming to explore homeowners' trade-offs between public and private climate change adaptation to urban floods
Trade-offs between public and private climate change adaptation to urban floods: A serious game to research homeowner’s preferences between traditionally designed ‘grey’ measures and ‘Nature-based solutions (NbS)’. Game participants are students, inhabitants, and decision-makers in the Netherlands. The ultimate aim is to draw recommendations for communication and education strategies that motivate individuals to take adaptation actions.
 

By Ir. Martijn Lugten
Faculty of ABE

The Report: click here
 

In-depth measurements of thermal effects linked to trees and green surfaces in street canyons
The Urban Comfort Lab, situated in Hoofddorp, investigates the effect of the built environment and urban vegetation onto aircraft noise propagation and courtyard microclimate. The seed funding from the climate action program will be invested into a series of microclimate sensors to gain a better understanding of the local cooling effect of different tree configurations in street canyons and courtyards.

By Dr. Luca Iuorio
Faculty of ABE

The Report: will follow soon
 

Reporting ‘space, time and everyday life’ in the Delta
The project focuses on video documentaries that describe the natural, social, and spatial transitional configuration of the Netherlands during the execution of the Delta Works. Reportages show how the Dutch society has struggled against water to create a safe and dry land. Water infrastructure is described at the human scale, highlighting how big hydraulic projects always relate with our daily life. The project aims at revealing the role that engineering has in society, to debate how much we rely on it, and to question our common responsibility in dealing with climate adaptation.

By Ir Marit Bogert
Science Centre

The Report: will follow soon
 

Scaling up the NestWacht for higher impact
The NestWacht is a collaboration between TU Delft Science Centre, Citizen Science Lab (Leiden University) and Naturalis Biodiversity Center to involve individuals, families and primary schools in Leiden and Delft with nature in their city, and scientific research into the impact of climate change and local climate on nature and specifically on the nesting and breeding behavior of (garden) birds. By developing birdhouses with a climate sensor station in the roof and sensors and a camera on the inside, citizens can measure multiple climate parameters and particulate matter in their direct surrounding. Together with them, we will analyze the visual material of the birds, to see if the environment impacts the birds’ breeding success.