TERRAVISION was present at the EGU General Assembly 2026, held in Vienna, Austria, and online on 3–8 May 2026. The EGU General Assembly is Europe’s largest geosciences conference, this year bringing together more than 22,000 participants from over 125 countries.
Maria Dekavalla from the Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS), the project coordinator, presented a poster entitled “Continental-Scale Prospectivity Modelling of Volcanogenic Massive Sulphide Deposits in Europe Using a Mineral-System and Explainable Machine-Learning Framework“, co-authored with Sergio Tenorio Matanzo and Martín López Del Río (Tharsis Mining), and Chrysoula Papathanasiou and Angelos Amditis (ICCS).
The work, carried out within TERRAVISION, presents the first integrated European-scale prospectivity model for volcanogenic massive sulphide (VMS) deposits, an important source of copper, zinc, lead, gold and silver for Europe’s critical raw materials supply. While Europe has a long mining history and extensive geological datasets, prospectivity assessments have so far remained largely confined within national boundaries. The TERRAVISION approach overcomes this limitation by merging harmonised public geoscience datasets within a mineral-system and machine-learning framework, using explainability techniques that make the model’s predictions transparent and geologically interpretable.
The model successfully identified over 97% of known VMS deposits and occurrences, and also highlighted prospective trends in regions with limited documented exploration — potential greenfield opportunities at a continental scale. Beyond VMS deposits, the proposed framework is transferable to other deposit types, demonstrating the strategic potential of continental-scale, explainable machine-learning approaches for strengthening Europe’s raw materials knowledge base.
The poster attracted the interest of the geoscientific community and offered an excellent opportunity to share TERRAVISION’s results and exchange ideas with researchers working on mineral exploration and critical raw materials across Europe.
