WAter & Air QuAlity monitoring for Smart VegeTAL Infrastructures in cities – WAQATALI

The sustainability of the cities of today and tomorrow is joined to coherent revegetation policies of the urban space and intelligent planning via decision support tools. The Waqatali laboratory takes this problematic by combining the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, participatory decision support and innovative expertise services to increase the environmental and societal co-benefits of plants by city.

Cities and societies are undergoing heavy changes in order to face the climatic, environmental and societal challenges which are observed in Northern and Southern countries. Vegetation, usually identified as an ornament, is now becoming an infrastructure that provides services to inhabitants as roads, bus network or internet.



Thinking of green spaces as an urban infrastructure is a new idea that we are defending in the Waqatali laboratory. Thus, the plant infrastructure is qualified by its benefits (temperature, air quality, etc.) and its costs (economic, spatial and water). Its design and deployment are the result of concerted actions between expert, decision-makers and city managers, within sustainable urban planner framework.



Waqatali is based on an established partnership between Urbasense and the IRD's UMMISCO International research Unit. It will develop applied services based on fundamental cross-disciplinary researches. The laboratory will structure its activities around 6 axes of research and innovation (R&I): Axis 0 - Coordination and promotion of the project; Axis 1 - Irrigation deficit strategy; Axis 2 - Multi-criteria classification of local green spaces; Axis 3 - Construction of a Global Green Infrastructure Effectiveness Indicator; Axis 4 - Development and production of scientific equipment dedicated to measurements; Axis 5 - Participatory modeling for decision support.

These R&I will allow us to produce environmental data, develop a coherent suite of instrumentation, data processing tools, and let us imagine indicators and methodologies to support decision.



For example, we will develop fundamental researches to design a decision support and participatory planning service dedicated to design and deploy green facilities by stakeholders. This service will rely on the Qameleo and WAOU environmental stations which produce a qualified measurement of environmental parameters (temperatures, air quality, surface humidity, etc.).



Thanks to the data acquired, a model based on artificial intelligence will be able to carry out a cost / benefit assessment of the strategies devised by stakeholders during consultation workshops. The simulations will report on the efficiency of the green infrastructure, through various indicators including cooling and air quality. We will contribute to fill a lack of the literature by promoting a new Global Indicator of Efficiency of the Green Infrastructure that will synthesize the cost / benefit ratio of a green infrastructure at the city scale and will measure Green Infrastructure efficiency.

All scientific and technological productions will be developed inside the joint group Urbasense and the IRD Campus in Bondy (France center of UMMISCO and CoFAB in Bondy). They will tested and evaluated in two case study, to different agglomerations: Dijon in France and Dakar in Senegal.