Demonstration Sites

The REMARKABLE project is application-driven, putting the research and innovation tasks in WP1-3 in the context of inter-disciplinary effort to deploy, test, validate and collect data sets inspired by rural use cases that will be evaluated at predefined demonstration sites.

First, the REMARKABLE solution will be applied, implemented, demonstrated, and validated in real-life environments, initially in a pre-demonstrator (pre-validation phase) after which a full demonstration will follow (validation phase). The geographical dispersion of the demo sites (covering the North, South, East and West Africa) will allow for exploration and confirm the replicability of services and solutions in different socio-economic contexts to maximise the impact of REMARKABLE services across rural areas in Africa.

Our demonstration sites include:

• Lagunas de la Mata y Torrevieja, Natural Park (Alicante, Spain): is a protected area whose environmental value has been globally recognized since 1972 in the RAMSAR convention. It is composed of two salt lagoons: the pink lagoon (i.e. Torrevieja lagoon), where the Torrevieja salt mine is located, and the green lagoon (i.e., La Mata Lagoon), where the park’s Interpretation Centre is located. The park is used by many water-birds, including large concentrations of some species such as the flamingo and the black-headed grebe, and other wild life.
• National Park Fruska Gora (Novi Sad, Serbia): Fruska Gora is a national park situated near the city of Novi Sad, Serbia. The area of active protection is about 25ha large. Fruska Gora is an isolated and narrow mountain (the height of the highest peak 539m) surrounded by Pannonian Plane. Large areas within the park (valleys, canyons) are not covered by mobile cellular network signal and they represent suitable locations for rural IoT experimentation.
• The School Farm (TSF), Federal University of Technology (FUT) (Minna, Nigeria): The farm is part of approximately 6,800 hectares of land at Gidan-Kwano, along the Minna – Kataeregi – Bida Road, Niger state, North Central Nigeria, owned by FUT. The farm is used by experts from the University in the areas of Engineering, Agriculture and Agricultural Technology.
• Domaine itto SARL, Fes Meknes (Fes Meknes, Morocco): Domaine Itto is a family farming business in the region of Fes Meknes, with coverage of 400 hectares split into 3 farms: 2 farms producing 100% almonds and 1 farm producing fresh fruits (peaches, nectarines, apricots, plums, pears, kaki, etc.). The farm has been in the agriculture area since 1985 with a vision to deliver healthy and premium quality fruits to customers, with high attention to respect mother nature.
• Welgevallen Experimental Farm, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch (South Africa): Welgevallen is one of Stellenbosch University’s research farms and is part of the Faculty of AgriSciences. Plants are grown in specialised greenhouses with controlled temperature, humidity and photoperiods. In addition to the greenhouses, temperature-controlled growth rooms are available for conducting growth experiments on various aspects of plant growth and development. For larger scale production, growth tunnels are also available.