To join or help form a PRIMA consortium on urban greening, water and heat in semi-arid cities, contributing two arid Saudi cities, a working decision platform and an ongoing European validation campaign, as a self-funded partner.
1. urban greening
2. semi-arid cities
3. urban heat island
4. land surface temperature (ECOSTRESS, Sentinel-2)
5. urban cooling validation
6. water-use efficiency
7. urban water balance
8. nature-based solutions
9. climate adaptation
10. urban forestry
11. tree inventory
12. drought-adapted flora
13. invasive species monitoring
14. native species
15. citizen science
16. crowdsourced field survey
17. gamification
18. biodiversity assessment
19. landscape ecology
20. remote sensing
21. open data
22. decision-support platform
23. water–energy–food nexus
24. Saudi Arabia, Spain, Cyprus
We propose a cooperation on heat, water and greening in semi-arid cities that pairs two arid Saudi cities with Mediterranean partners who have measured these things on the ground. AriVerda, our platform, already runs over Jeddah and Riyadh and, since October 2026, logs public air-temperature sensors and AEMET reference stations hourly in Murcia, Zaragoza, Santa Cruz de Tenerife and Nicosia against the same 10 m thermal and vegetation products. We seek partners for three things.
First, validation: groups with urban climate networks or soil-water measurements who can check our cooling and water-balance figures, which today carry the evidence label “prior”, and in return receive the platform run over their own cities with the sharpened thermal stacks, canopy, leaf-seasonality and biodiversity layers. Second, flora: a shared, sourced evidence register for the regional flora, where every trait claim (native status, invasiveness, leaf habit, nitrogen fixation, pioneer behaviour) is one row with its source and its status, built with us for the Mediterranean the way it is built for the Arabian Peninsula, and cross-checked against GBIF, WCVP and GloNAF.
Third, people: a crowdsourced field survey of invasive and native species, run with municipal control. The platform’s Site Journal already takes dated photographs and leaf-state records, its Prosopis screen flags a priority invasive from orbit for field confirmation, and a municipal pilot in Jeddah is designed around community removal events under an approval workflow. We want to extend this into a gamified survey, with points, districts and seasons, that residents, schools and volunteer groups can play in Murcia or Nicosia as well as in Jeddah, so that the invasive and native map of each city is observed, not modelled, and the same rules apply on both shores.
Our contribution is the platform, the method, two arid cities nobody in the network holds; what we ask of partners is their measurements, their inventories, their field networks, and their experience of running a Mediterranean consortium.
DBG Analytics is based in Saudi Arabia, which is not a PRIMA Participating State. We understand that an entity from a non-participating country may join a consortium self-funded, without coordinating or counting toward the minimum size, and we are prepared to take part on that basis; should a call topic, a bilateral arrangement or a partner’s national rules allow our participation to be funded, we would welcome it. Our biggest challenge today is that municipalities in our region are proactively planting invasive flora as greening, and no shared, sourced evidence base exists to show them otherwise. That is why the flora register and the crowdsourced invasive and native survey are central to this request: we want to build them with partners who have faced the same problem on the Mediterranean shore. We are looking for a coordinator and partners in Spain, Cyprus, Italy, Portugal or Greece for the 2027 work plan, and can bring data, method and a running platform to a consortium from the first conversation.
