STEREO IV, the new phase of the Belgian Earth Observation programme, got under way!

#STEREO, #Belgique

Publié le 7 juin 2022

At the end of March, the Secretary of State for Science Policy gave the green light to STEREO IV. With a budget comparable to STEREO III's, BELSPO will continue to have the chance to finance high quality research in the domain of earth observation until the end of this decade.

Getting to the job at hand

After approval of the programme it took less than a week for the STEREO IV managers to launch and publish online the first call for proposals. Even though potential applicants were only given little time to submit a Declaration of Interest, the call was clearly eagerly awaited and a record number of 50 DOI’s was sent in by applicants from 65 different research laboratories. Moreover, one third of the applicants had not submitted a STEREO proposal before.

The next deadline is the 15th of June (submission of full proposals). The summer will be dedicated to a two-step evaluation of the proposals. A written evaluation by 4 foreign experts per proposal will be carried out followed by an oral defense of the best proposals before a panel of experts. Our Programme Board will then select the best proposals in September. The goal is to have around 8 projects starting before the end of the year.

A second call for proposals (targeting thematic projects) is planned for early 2023 at the latest.