Photo Caption: Minister for Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science James Lawless, Diarmuid O’Brien, CEO Research Ireland, and Dr Ruth Freeman, Director of Research for Society, with members of the National Challenge Fund Prize Teams (Dr Corrado Grappiolo 4th from left).
AI2PEAT WINS NATIONAL CHALLENGE FUND PRIZE
Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, James Lawless TD, has announced over €2.5 million in prize funding for the (opens in a new window)AI2Peat and(opens in a new window) DRIVE teams, the first National Challenge Fund prize winners. Funded by the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility, the Fund calls on researchers to identify problems related to Ireland’s Green Transition and Digital Transformation, and work directly with those most affected to solve them.
Ireland’s degraded peatlands are releasing carbon emissions, polluting our watercourses, and losing their unique biodiversity. Their vast surface area is a limiting factor for in-situ monitoring at a larger scale. In turn, this slows conservation planning and the verification of restoration results. The AI2Peat Project leverages ecological knowledge with remote sensing and Artificial Intelligence expertise to help solve this scaling issue.
AI2Peat has successfully progressed their project through three rounds of competitive funding to achieve their latest prize under the Future Digital Challenge category.
AI2Peat combines satellite imagery, ecological expertise, and AI, to help protect and restore peatlands – one of Ireland’s most vital carbon stores. Its machine learning pipeline continuously acquires satellite imagery to produce ecotope maps which indicate the ecology or condition of raised bogs. AI2Peat uses ground truth ecotope data from the National Parks and Wildlife Service to train a canonical ensemble learning model. This employs a hierarchy of binary classifiers to classify ecotope types and is validated by domain experts to assess reliability and accuracy. Currently, AI2Peat uses freely available Sentinel-2 data but additional funding could enable the purchase of other remote sensing data to improve the models. When combined with other scientific elements, such as hydrology and carbon fluxes, these maps could reliably estimate peatland condition at scale and allow in-situ surveys to focus on priority areas.
The AI2Peat consortium includes CeADAR (Dr Corrado Grappiolo), iCRAG (Dr Eoghan Hologan), and the National Parks & Wildlife Service (Dr Shane Regan) and is funded by Research Ireland under under their National Challenge Fund / Future Digital Challenge.
Dr Corrado Grappiolo, UCD School of Computer Science and CeADAR, leads AI2Peat. He said, “We are deeply honoured for having been selected to enter the Prize Phase of the National Challenge Fund - Future Digital Challenge. AI2Peat has collaboration at its core, and our achievements would have never been possible without the expertise and guidance of the National Parks and Wildlife Service and the 200+ stakeholders we have been interacting with. A huge portion of our success is due to the massive support provided by Research Ireland. Thanks to their mentoring and training activities we mastered design thinking and theory of change skills; that allowed us to truly work towards a game-changing solution to monitoring peatland conditions at national scale that is the most impactful and useful as possible.”
The prize funding will help the AI2Peat team to develop their solutions to address the major challenges on the road to a more sustainable future. Both Ireland and the European Union are committed to becoming carbon neutral by 2050. The project will play a key role in supporting this goal.
Credits
The AI2Peat consortium comprises CeADAR – Ireland’s Centre for Applied AI, (opens in a new window)iCRAG - the Research Ireland Centre for Applied Geosciences and the (opens in a new window)NPWS – Ireland’s National Parks and Wildlife Services.
AI2Peat is funded by (opens in a new window)Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland under its (opens in a new window)Future Digital Challenge call with grant number 22/NCF/FD/10969. It started on 1st January 2023 and is currently funded until June 2025.
Date 23 October 2025