PRESS RELEASE – SPATRA Concludes with Validated Demonstrators, Scientific Contributions and a Public Knowledge Hub
December 2025 – The SPATRA project is entering its final stage of two-year programme, delivering the results of its road and rail demonstrators and making all public materials available through an open Knowledge Hub. The project demonstrated how Earth Observation, GNSS data and in-situ measurements can be combined to support monitoring tasks and improve situational awareness in transport operations.
Throughout the final months, the consortium completed the validation of the two demonstrators:
- Road demonstrator: produced congestion and border-crossing observations using EO imagery and GNSS-derived movement patterns. The results illustrate how satellite-supported workflows can complement existing monitoring tools used in road-transport operations.
- Rail demonstrator: focused on temperature-related risks, delivering results on thermal-anomaly detection and model-based estimations of rail-buckling risk supported by EO-derived temperature fields.
Together, the demonstrators show how multi-source data can enhance infrastructure awareness and support operational planning in realistic conditions.
Scientific outputs developed during the project strengthened the research foundations for these demonstrators. Publications released during the project include a review examining the role of Earth Observation in railway-infrastructure monitoring and a study introducing an AI-based method for estimating rail buckling risk using EO-derived temperature models. These contributions informed the modelling work carried out in the final project phase and provide a basis for future research activities.
Knowledge sharing continued throughout the project and included webinars, presentations and collaborative sessions with end-user organisations. To support long-term access to these materials, SPATRA established a public Knowledge Hub which hosts all scientific publications, deliverables, visual summaries and webinar materials in a single accessible collection. This resource is intended to support stakeholders interested in the project’s approach and results and to enable further exploration of satellite-supported monitoring methods.
Field Testing and Validation Activities
SPATRA also carried out practical validation activities with end-user partners. A dedicated field session took place at the Batrovci border crossing, where the road-workstream team demonstrated elements of the monitoring workflow and discussed congestion-monitoring indicators with operational stakeholders. This was followed by a validation workshop at NELT, where partners reviewed the demonstrator outputs, discussed their practical relevance and explored how selected workflows could align with existing processes in logistics environments.
A detailed overview of these activities is available on the project website.
Both the field test and the workshop provided valuable insights for finalising the demonstrator results and strengthened the connection between the project’s research-oriented work and real operational contexts.
As SPATRA concludes, partners will continue to explore opportunities for refining the developed methods, expanding the modelling approaches and engaging with communities working in transport, environmental monitoring and space-based services. The project invites stakeholders to access the publicly available materials and to build on the results produced during the two-year programme.
Jelena Vasic, Director of Marketing & Communications | Zentrix Lab
jelena.vasic@zentrixlab.eu
+381 63 7257336